Jean-Edouard
Marconnet
/ TECHNICAL ARTIST
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
The Project
As a Technical Artist student and Game Artist degree holder, my passion for the video game industry and cinema has led me to diverse professional exploration.
Following the success of my end-of-study project, a significant career turning point emerged with an exciting offer from Illumination Studios Paris to work as an Environment Artist on The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Joining this prestigious studio fulfilled my dream and provided an opportunity to challenge my skills in a new and ambitious environment that synergizes my love for both cinema and video games.
Guided by environment supervisor Frédéric MAINIL, I focused on producing assets for the vegetation department and setting up scenes in Houdini to seamlessly integrate instances within shots, marking a transformative experience in my career.
I joined the studio two-thirds through production, in the environment team specialized in vegetation. At this stage of the production, most of the assets were already created and they needed people to work on shots with Houdini. Following screenshots are quick reproduction of the workflow.
Produce simple assets
Being a rookie, the first task given to me, after an InK (internal asset manager) training, was a small asset, a plant container, to know my speed of work, adaptation and above all to begin to assimilate the pipeline. For this kind of asset, the pipe was quite simple. I started to import the container from InK into SpeedTree before making the plant following concept art. Once done, I had to make quick renders inside SpeedTree for supervisor validation (Step 1).
At this stage I iterated a lot because the concept wasn’t clear enough to validate my work easily. After the first validation, I had to export the mesh with triangles as leaves into Houdini (Step 2). These triangles will give us good orientation and will be replaced by final meshes, already prepared (LODs, UVs and textures) in Maya, during the render.
Once everything was imported in Houdini, I had to finalize each LODs and replace each triangles by points with the corresponding orientation (Step 3).
I exported everything into their own ray traced rendering engine (proprietary), linking everything correctly for the textures and the lights to make a “final” turn around render of the asset always with a character in the scene as a reference. If this turn around matched the expectations of the artistic direction, I just had to deliver my work in the asset manager provided for this purpose waiting to be used by the other departments, if not, I had to redo the process according to the feedback.
Scatter instances on shots
After a second week doing this kind of task and some meetings with my supervisor, they decided to entrust me with tasks that matched more my skills and what I was hired for, to work with Houdini. From that moment, my work started to get really interesting. In addition to creating assets, our team has the responsibilities to work on shots and scatter vegetation instances according to sequences but also on bigger environment assets. For those new tasks, the pipeline was a bit more complex than the previous one.
To scatter vegetation on shot I had to import in Houdini the cameras, characters, the surfaces on which I will place the instances and each element of the scenery that I needed to work with. Once everything was imported, I could start to work.
First, I used the camera frustum as a big volume (Step 1) to remove all items outside the camera's field of view.
I combined it with an algorithm that calculated the position of each point of the terrain at each frame of the shot relative to the camera (Step 2). To proceed I used a solver as well as a timeshift node (Step 3). This allowed me to be able to identify and delete points that will never be visible in the plan (Step 4).
Then, I remeshed the surfaces that I kept depending on the distance from the camera, as the scatter density will depend on the wireframe density (Step 5). It’s really important to be precise at this point as we need to optimize our scene as much as possible to help faster rendering but also keep enough quality.
Second, I started to scatter my instances depending on the art direction of the sequence by trying to make each shot matching each other while repartition will change following the camera location. Each instance has its own spawning rule. I first removed every area colliding inside environment assets then I used numerous masks for each instance according to spawning rules, affecting the scale, the location mostly but also matching character movement to avoid huge penetration that would be hard to handle (Step 6).
Finally, once everything was done, I made a quick compositing path with Nuke before the render and if it was fine for the lead I could export the whole shot.
Scatter instances on big assets
The third kind of work I had to do, also in Houdini, was to scatter vegetation instances on huge assets, mostly islands, to fill the background. For this work, the pipeline was a mix of the two previous ones. For this task, the set up was already done by my supervisor, I just had to tweak instances and parameters to match artistic direction.
