Feature production as a lighting/compositing artist within Dreamworks Animation is a delicate balance of manipulating data at scale, leveraging an artistic eye for shot work, and active problem solving on technical and creative levels. It’s within this framework that a lighting artist will be responsible for understanding Moonray, DWA’s proprietary path tracer and Sceneflow, which is a suite of proprietary tools designed to ingest and handle USD data within Houdini. The work represented in this reel contains the following responsibilities I held as a lighting/compositing artist throughout the show production:
Working within light rig setups from show leads
Shot lighting and shot editing based on a per-shot basis
One off shot work and light rig setup
Troubleshooting bad data and understanding when issues could be resolved in lighting rather than asking for revisions upstream
Managing and optimizing render data from Houdini/USD so that shot work in Nuke could be handled
Shot compositing and shot finaling by leveraging Nuke workflows and setups
DI Matte generation and Tech Fixing shots for downstream departments