Hasta La Motion!

Job Title: Lighting Technical Director
Department: 3D
Location: London
Start date: Immediate

Reports To: Head of 3D
Direct Reports: CG Supervisor and Sequence Supervisor

Key Purpose of the Job:

Shot lighting and rendering for various exciting feature film projects.

Needs to Do:

The position of Lighting Technical Director requires someone with a thorough knowledge of 3D Computer Graphics, with several years of experience in a similar role working on broadcast or film projects. Successful applicants will have a well developed ‘eye’, a good working knowledge of art, design and film lighting as well as a solid technical grounding in renderers like Pixar’s Renderman or Mental Ray. Some experience in Look Development and shader setup would be an advantage.

Needs to Know:

• Full knowledge of Maya (Mel knowledge a plus) and/ or Houdini
• Familiarity with pipeline issues
• Demonstrable experience in shot lighting and rendering.
• Showreels featuring ‘photoreal’ work would be preferred.
• A good general TD BG is desirable
• Minimum of 3 years experience in a similar role.

Needs to be:

• Pro-active
• Technically adept
• Team oriented
• Adaptable
• Able to take direction

Measures of Performance

• Delivery of required content, on time
• Continuous improvement

Please send your CV, cover letter, showreel and breakdown to Alice Tuxford at 77 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 5DU.

If you have any questions please email jobs@dneg.com

People often ask me what kind of video formats I use when I render final animation from After Effects, or preview for clients. So I decided to share my rendering habits with you.
Let’s say you have imaginary 3D project and you need to show it for client, make DVD and upload it to youtube or vimeo. So when your 3D scene is finished you need to render it out and continue working in After Effects.

Cinema 4D
C4D have really comfortable and user friendly render settings panel. Just go to Save section and you have all format settings, but witch one to use? If you have a simple scene, and it looks good, you don’t plan to adjust separate passes like shadow, diffuse, etc. in After Effects, then i prefer to export TARGA image sequence. I can say that .tga is one of my favorite image formats, it can store up to 32 bits image data and extra 8-bit alpha channel. So if it’s simple scene with or without alpha channel, just render out .tga sequence and it will get job done.
If you have complicated scene, where you want to adjust shadow or other passes in AE, cinema 4D have an awesome Multi Pass render option. And then you need two file formats, for Regular image i suggest to leave a old good .tga and for Multi-Pass image I choose Photoshop (psd) image sequences. And there is another option to save After Effects project file. I always use it, then after C4D finishes rendering you need just to open AE project file, and you have all Multi-Passes as separate layers then it’s super easy to adjust them.
With other 3D applications it’s pretty much the same deal.

Modo 401
In modo I always use .tga, what a surprise! Modo multi pass rendering is a bit different than in cinema, in modo you need to create Render Output layers in shader tree and choose what effect it have. One is always Final Color, and you can add other like shadow density, reflection shading, etc. And for each of them you need to set up output filename and format. When it finishes rendering you need manually import it to After Effects.

You can read about After Effects part in my blog

I would like to ask if someone knows how to re-assign vertex ids . Maya creates vertex ids by default(when we model),i.e. for example i need the id count to start from nose instead of ear …

I would like to understand UV channels in Nuke. I read the user guide, but i have doubts yet. What is the difference between UV coordinate and UV channels? I read Ron Brikmann too, but there isnt a good explanation about UVs.