Can you elaborate on your duties as a principal cinematic artist, like how similar or dissimilar is it compared to what you were doing (before becoming a supervisor)? Are you rendering things in real-time or is it offline rendering with traditional compositing? Are you still focused on environments only or is the role/duties a bit more broad? Cheers and happy holidays!
adrienlambertCreator
I’ll probably go into more detail once some of the stuff I’ve worked on this year gets released, but here’s the short(ish) version for now:
As a Principal digimatte Artist my day-to-day is actually pretty similar creatively to what I was doing more as a senior env/digimatte artist while at ILM. I’m still very hands-on: modeling, assembling, lookdev/lighting, rendering and even pre-comping full environments (mostly set extensions and hero establishing shots). The main difference going back to an artist position is I’m no longer worrying about scheduling or herding cats; production handles that. Overall way less meetings so I can just focus on making things look as awesome as possible.
At Blizzard the environment team is split between “mainline” (big shared assets properly "pipelined" that touch FX, animation, lighting etc.) and “digimatte/generalist”. Here focusing on digimatte shots, they tend to be more self-contained, so I can sometimes take a shot all the way from previz → final render + pre-comp. That one-person-army workflow feels very familiar and honestly makes a ton of sense for bidding and speed.
Pretty much a similar structure at ILM and DNEG, though ended up doing both sides at these companies between mainline and digimatte/generalist approaches.
I also get a bit more creative freedom here. This year I’ve sometimes been handed a blank slate and asked to previz shots, animate cameras myself, and drive the whole look of a sequence under guidance of art directors; definitely broader than pure environment work in traditional VFX though it does happen to have similar responsibilities as a Generalist depending on projects and budgets.
Hierarchy is a lot flatter than in film too; way fewer layers of sups and client feedback, which is refreshing. Still 90% offline rendering (Path Tracer) and compositing, just like in VFX; the 10% left are in game cut scenes rendered on internal Realtime engines... I haven't been touching that side of things though.
Anyway, that’s the quick take! Thanks for the interest and hope you’re having a great holiday season!
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Can you elaborate on your duties as a principal cinematic artist, like how similar or dissimilar is it compared to what you were doing (before becoming a supervisor)? Are you rendering things in real-time or is it offline rendering with traditional compositing? Are you still focused on environments only or is the role/duties a bit more broad? Cheers and happy holidays!
I’ll probably go into more detail once some of the stuff I’ve worked on this year gets released, but here’s the short(ish) version for now: As a Principal digimatte Artist my day-to-day is actually pretty similar creatively to what I was doing more as a senior env/digimatte artist while at ILM. I’m still very hands-on: modeling, assembling, lookdev/lighting, rendering and even pre-comping full environments (mostly set extensions and hero establishing shots). The main difference going back to an artist position is I’m no longer worrying about scheduling or herding cats; production handles that. Overall way less meetings so I can just focus on making things look as awesome as possible. At Blizzard the environment team is split between “mainline” (big shared assets properly "pipelined" that touch FX, animation, lighting etc.) and “digimatte/generalist”. Here focusing on digimatte shots, they tend to be more self-contained, so I can sometimes take a shot all the way from previz → final render + pre-comp. That one-person-army workflow feels very familiar and honestly makes a ton of sense for bidding and speed. Pretty much a similar structure at ILM and DNEG, though ended up doing both sides at these companies between mainline and digimatte/generalist approaches. I also get a bit more creative freedom here. This year I’ve sometimes been handed a blank slate and asked to previz shots, animate cameras myself, and drive the whole look of a sequence under guidance of art directors; definitely broader than pure environment work in traditional VFX though it does happen to have similar responsibilities as a Generalist depending on projects and budgets. Hierarchy is a lot flatter than in film too; way fewer layers of sups and client feedback, which is refreshing. Still 90% offline rendering (Path Tracer) and compositing, just like in VFX; the 10% left are in game cut scenes rendered on internal Realtime engines... I haven't been touching that side of things though. Anyway, that’s the quick take! Thanks for the interest and hope you’re having a great holiday season!