Kyoryu
Every once in a blue moon, a very special project comes along as an irrefutable opportunity. This happened in June 2023, right after I finished my contract with Imagendary Studios. My good friend David Luong introduced me to the team at Floating Rock, a studio from New Zealand. They were in need of a lighting artist, to finish a project created by one of their talented animators, Benjamin Mulot. This project is called “Kyoryu”.
The pace was fast, and I finished nearly 30 shots in just over a month. The project had solid color key paintings for the main shots. Given it was an Unreal Engine project, working on the lighting was incredibly rewarding. Once I matched the colors and atmosphere for the key shots, I applied that same touch to the remaining shots. Unreal Engine not only speeds up the process as a lighting tool but also accelerates production itself, as it can be seen as a good portion of the pipeline.
Besides the lighting tasks, I also set up a compositing workflow in Nuke. With Python, I created tools for shot propagation treatment, sequence-wide tweaks, automatic shot versioning, Quicktime generation, rendering statistics, automatic contact sheet creation sorted by shot number, gathering shots for review, among other things…
I’m truly grateful to have been part of this project. It’s been well received by the public, reaching over a million views during its debut week. Kyoryu will certainly pave the road for the development of new and exciting content by Floating Rock.
Make sure to visit Kyoryu’s Youtube page here and watch/like/comment on the video here.