Dune
I had to chance to spend over a year working on Dune as a Lead Environment Generalist TD. During this time and with the help of our amazing Vancouver team, I got involved in the creation of some of the biggest environments of the movie, including the city of Arrakeen (in all its different versions throughout the movie, from day to night and from its original state to its final destruction during the Harkonen attack), the Caladan's hangar, the Fremen/Harkonen attack during the intro and a few one-off shots here and there.
This show will remain a special one because of its scope of work, but also for being the first one we had to work on from home when the pandemic hit 2 years ago. It's also one of these rare projects where you can be extremely proud of the final result, from the beautiful cinematography and direction to the raving critics! ... the kind of projects that reminds you why you decided to get into this industry in the first place!
We created an extensive desert environment for this sequence... we obviously don't see much of it in the final shots but glad we got to translate the mood of the original concepts.
I also did some DMP work on this specific shot.
For this sequence, we provided both the exterior on a cyc and the hangar set dressing (props, vegetation).
For this sequence, we provided both the exterior on a cyc and the hangar set dressing (props, vegetation).
The big chunk of our work was to create Arrakeen City from scratch. The city had to work for every different angle, no matter how close or far the camera was.
The city had to integrate into a real location somewhere in the Jordan desert. It allowed us to reuse some of the plate photography as a base for our CG work.
We ended up with a 20x20km city with dozens of districts. It took a while to find the perfect recipe for the layout/look, but once we got it it was fairly easy to propagate through the entire city.
The assets (model/ldev) were mostly entirely managed by our Build department. We then took this huge library and started building the city with dozens of building assets.
One of our main challenges was to bring some life to this mostly underground and sand-covered city.
Some of the things we did to get there were to park a few ornithopters around to help with the scale and add several layers of city buildings.
We also had a few versions of a 360 skydome for all the background environments, covering different times of the day.
For this sequence, we rendered a 20k still frame of the city that we then projected on basic geo. That way it allowed us to cover dozens of shots with not much CG render time while keeping a maximum of control in comp.
We built an entire 3d environment for the hangar (model/ldev/render) that had to blend with the practical set.
We took over some of the spaceport work done in Montreal for the attack shots. Our work consisted of up-resing some of the assets, layout and some extra dmp.
One of the challenges was obviously all the interactive lighting from the ornthopters and the explosion.
That one was a one-off that I got to get from scratch to nearly final comp. I used the base spaceport asset and up-resed it with a lot more assets/animation to bring some life to it. I also modelled/ldev/lit/rendered/dmp the entire environment around it.
A year of work being destroyed in a matter of a few seconds.
We had to manage a few custom version of the city layout for the Duncan's escape.
With lots of extra set dressing...
... managing the destruction of the city...
... an entirely new underground section...
One of the final views of Arrakeen. I did some preliminary work on this shot but the final DMP is from the amazing Tadaomi Kawasaki!
Another one-off of the destroyed Arrakeen. I helped by providing a few CG layers (scatter/destruction/...) and the final shot DMP was done by Kobi Moldavski.