Building Assets

Over the course of my career, I’ve created a wide variety of assets for many different productions. This project is a small presentation of that process and the challenges involved.

We’re all familiar with big-budget films and the famous names behind them. But smaller productions also require significant effort to get a scene just right. Just a few years ago, even low to mid-range productions needed a full crew—directors, actors, stunt performers, set supervisors, lighting artists, makeup and wardrobe teams, camera operators, coordinators, gaffers, and many others—before a VFX artist could even begin work. Then it would be up to us to step in, do the job, and send the results to post-production.

In this project, I was responsible for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, shading, and look development of the assets. Later, I also handled the lighting and rendering of the scenes you see here. The only parts I wasn’t involved with were camera tracking and final compositing.

I was instructed to work within a light-centric pipeline, delivering scenes with carefully crafted custom shaders to give the compositing team greater flexibility. Even so, I frequently had to make changes and variations to the buildings—regardless of the long list of AOVs that were supposed to cover everything. Fortunately, the look development pipeline I built gave me the speed and structure I needed to respond to feedback quickly and efficiently.

Look development for VFX is never a simple task. Every director wants the CGI to reach the highest level of realism possible. I’m not sure whether the future of cinema or gaming lies in prompts or AI workflows, but based on experience, I can say that even today, strong skills and the right tools are still essential to achieving true realism.

For this project, the most critical elements were precise texturing, advanced shading, and pushing PBR to its limits. A well-thought-out lighting setup solved many of the challenges, allowing the final buildings to blend naturally into the live-action shots—as if they were filmed on set.

My advice to the next generation of VFX and game artists who strive for realism: be patient. Master the fundamentals before tackling the more complex challenges. The results are worth it.

All rights reserved to Stargate Studios Malta.