My name is Eric Schultz and I’m a Senior and Lead Lighting Technical Director at DNEG.
DNEG was originally known as double negative and it was founded in 1998. They’ve worked on
a number of Oscar-Winning or Emmy-Winning shows such as most recently Tenet, but some of their
other projects are Chernobyl, Interstellar, Inception, Dune, which has wowed audiences
with some of the VFX work that we’ve done. And I had the pleasure of working on Blade Runner 2049.
Currently, there are around 9 sites worldwide where DNEG is based and there are roughly around
1,000 employees working on different episodic and TV projects. I’m a lead at the Vancouver office.
We have roughly around 400 to 500 employees. On Star Trek Discovery Season 3, we worked on roughly
around 7 episodes over the course of the season. In terms of shot count, the volume of shots was
astronomical. We had to adopt more of a film pipeline compared to a typical TV pipeline,
just due to the scale of the environments in the shots we would be working on this season.
We started out in Maya, with using ZBrush as well, for modeling the assets and then we used
Substance and a little bit of Mari for texturing and then that was passed off back into Maya for
animation and layout. And then for effects, that was typically done in Houdini,
with VDB-s in Alembics being passed to us from the different departments, into lighting in Clarisse,
where we would then do shader lookdev in Clarisse and lighting and rendering in Clarisse. One
of the biggest challenges when working on the Nebula episode was just trying to visualize how
the Nebula itself would look like once it passed from the different departments and into lighting.
At first for a couple of the shots, specifically the Nebula sequence,
we looked at rendering in Houdini, but we quickly realized it would be a lot better
to render everything in Clarisse just so we could get that additional integration from the lighting
of the ships. We were able to cast light on the Nebula and then we were able to get accurate
reflections and integrations of the Nebula onto the ships themselves. Clarisse was instrumental
in terms of render times and in terms of setup as well. We realized that it would be faster to do it
within Clarisse so we could easily bring in the different VDB caches that Effects had lookdeved,
placed them in combiners, and then easily be able to bash out different structures for the Nebula,
and then be able to place that around creating the scale and scope that we wanted for
the ships to fly through. The biggest challenges we faced with the city environment was just
due to how complex this environment was in terms of the amount of assets we had
to deal with. We had this heavy tree asset that we would deal with at the beginning of the shot,
and then as we went further back we dealt with the scattering of foliage within the park area,
and then placing combiners and different city buildings throughout, and then as we went even
further out we dealt with the different ship assets and then the bridge itself,
especially with how close up we were getting to some of these assets. They really had to hold up.
Clarisse helped a lot in terms of dealing with this shot. We were easily able to load the entire
environment within the viewport and also where we needed to add specific details to really “wow”
audiences. Clarisse was really helpful in terms of collaborating on this kind of huge scale of a shot
since we were easily able to publish out different setups that we had created in Clarisse and be able
to pass it off to the different artists who were working on it at the same time.
For the final episode that we worked on, we had the Star Trek crew trying to escape from this
interior engine room of this massive ship and so that took us around 3 to 4 months to complete,
just due to how large the environment was and due to the number of shots that we had to tackle
for this sequence. And luckily, with the power of Clarisse, we were able to easily load this
environment within the viewport to easily identify where we wanted to place the small pockets
of light for selling really the scale of this environment. The experience with using Clarisse
on episodic work compared to typical film work has been pretty seamless. With Clarisse, you’re pretty
quickly able to bash out an environment or a scene and get the feedback and the look that you want.
It is especially key on an episodic production, where the turnaround time is pretty quick compared
to film. You’re able to quickly bash out an idea of what the final look should be and present
that to get the feedback that you need to then address those nodes and get the final look that you want.
It’s a really powerful software that I think other software really need to catch up on in terms of
being able to handle these complex environments and being able to easily create them through
either a scatter system or being able to instance the different assets that you’re working with.