2024 - Chop Shop Post 1/2

 2024 was another busy year - this time with Chop Shop Post in Brisbane.

Some good aspects about this time at Chop Shop, some not so good.
On the positive - some outstanding work achieved. From my point of view I was mainly lighting and helping produce renders  - both shot renders and extra large marketing files. A lot of positive publicity generated.

This was an occasion where AI generated concept "art" for character design was made and then used to direct the Character Modelling and look Dev. This was quite challenging as the clients then expected a lot of realism - ie fur and realistic clothing.

The look dev process was complicated by a few factors - the clients was overseas in a different time zone and it seemed that meetings would sometimes occur with them without artists being present. What seemed like endless changes and tweaks was slowing us down for weeks.

Clothing was generated using Marvelous Designer .-With limited experience with MD, geometry had to be tediously analysed and optimised in prep for simulation in houdini. Once simmed into place for an appropriate pose for look-dev renders, we were then in a pretty good spot until they concept art was again changed.

Similarly - models were obtained from the internet - at various levels of quality and suitability and kitbashed a little too rapidly in order to hit desperate character look approvals. 
Long story short in the end - we had a TVC or something resembling a TVC. Extremely ambitious project - that never should have happened in the first place.

On the positive again - I learnt alot about Karma and setting up my Solaris networks - which I only briefly got to touch on in the previous contract