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hi Ben

many thanks.

great question!! I'll answer as best I can.

Intitially, blinns were going to be used on the show. Mainly because the studio was brand new, we basically 'built' the studio for the film from the ground up, so resources, people and budget were not as you would expect like at a studio such as ILM. The film was a low budget film and cost $20 million bucks all in, so it was all hands to the pumps to make it work. However, we did get a guy in by the name of Tim Chauncey, who was the Senior FX TD and he worked a bit of magic with the MIA X passes and another shader, and re-wrote them to produce a 'super shader' so you could do pretty much any surface with it it from skin to metal. We didnt use displacement for the models at all because of time and mostly our stuff was hard surfaced so the miss set normal node sufficed nicely to finish it off. The shader went thru constant changes over the course of 12months but it worked wonderfully...producing very photoreal looking assets, along with good light rigs.

Being in the position I was in enabled me to do the rounds on occasion with the 3d supervisor, and also the VFX Supervisor and Producer ( not all the time as I was too busy modelling) and I did throw a few suggestions out there in terms of look and so on, and other possibilities -some of which did make the film.

As for the modelling department, we did all our turntable renders with the sufface shader and AO nodes so it was a pretty bog standard setup there, 200 frame turntable at 1920x1080 HD. For stills or detailed shots we did the same or threw in 4k renders too, just depended on the asset really. Something like the MS1 prison model had tons of detail that you cant see in the film but if it wasnt there you would notice.

The models themselves would head off with a green and red shader on them, the green for smooth poly and red for non smoothed. The reason for this is that the models with the high details couldnt be displayed with smooth poly all the time because it became impossible to view them on screen in realtime so the green shader meant those surfaces required the approximation node. It was easier this way because when you had a scene with 30 starfighters in shot with smoothed details it was a nightmare to move the camera, so the Approx. node was our best friend at this point. Some people who were texturing and doing look dev would lose track of the shader setup so some bits got smoothed accidently that didnt need it. But I was on hand anyway to put it all back on track, I knew each poly personally on every model LOL. Also having the objects grouped in the shader color was a big help. These days we are doing it with a tag system so you can select a group of objects at anytime and apply a subd node to them whenever you like. So theres no hassle, plus our models have object IDs too when they go off to lighting.

hope that answers your question...sorry if its convoluted

Jay

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