A film that I worked out comes out this weekend, and I hope that you'll go see it. The film was the seventh and final film I worked on in my 2 year career in visual effects. I took a break from working on comics for those 2 years and worked at three studios: Stan Winston Digital, Rhythm and Hues and finally, Sony Pictures Imageworks.

The film is called Surf's Up.



It's a CG animated film about surfing penguins. May sound goofy, but it's the best of all the films I worked on. It's co-directed by Ash Brannon and Chris Buck. Ash Brannon was an animator and director at Pixar for years, having worked on Toy Story, Toy Story 2 and A Bug's Life while at Pixar. Chris Buck came from the 2D side, working as an animator and director at Disney. He directed Tarzan for Disney and worked on a ton of other stuff.

I spent an entire year on the film as a texture painter.



In 3D/CG, every model needs it's surface painted, which is what we did. We painted color maps, bump maps, displacement maps, transparency, specular, translucency and other maps.

I was the main character painter. I painted about half of the characters in the film, plus tons of background elements. So, I painted Jeff Bridge's character, and the female lead and tons of other stuff.



As an example, the penguins needed a color map to show what color their fur would be and show markings. We'd paint that. Then we'd also have, in some instances, a root and tip map that was different, to fade the hair to a different color at the root or tip. We'd paint a specular map for some penguins who have a colored highlight. The beaks and feet required bump maps to show bumpiness, cracks, whatever. Plants would also need a translucency map. So, for instance if you shine a light behind a leaf, you see that the stem stays darker, it block the light more. We'd paint maps for that. And transparency maps to sculpt the edges of the leafs, add holes or whatever.

Make sense?



It's the best crew I've had the pleasure of working with, and this great crew produced a great film. So, go see it, willya!?

Surf's Up on IMDB.com
Surf's Up official site