blizzard ENTERTAINMENT- Cinematics

I worked as a Senior Technical Director at Blizzard Entertainement with the Cinematic team and helped build pipelines and design tools for these four departments, Lighting, Compositing, FX and the 2.5D department (responsible for creating the hearthstone cinematic)
In this page I describe the work I did for each of departments and present some of the cinematic were my tools were heavily used.

Lighting

Helped Design a new pipeline that uses Maya and Redshift and played a key role in creating a proprietary render pass manager for Maya and Redshift.
Created a custom file format for the proprietary render pass manager tool.
Created a python API to submit Redshift jobs to the farm that automatically stores the footage in our asset system.
This API was then used to submit all Redshift jobs and support all the departments.
Created a lightrig publishing tool for our proprietary lighting tools and Renderman.
A part from doing all this development my role included supporting the lighting team, debugging tools and fixing render issues.

Here is some Cinematics were the tools I developed were used.

FX

Integrated Houdini into our crowd pipeline to allow publishing of valid particles simulation that can be used by our proprietary crowd rendering tool.
Helped improve the look of the explosion and the development of various micro solver to improve the look of smoke and explosions.
Created a system to handle creating vast ocean.
Created ship wakes system that can be easily copied and added on top of the ocean at render-time.

Here is some Cinematics were the tools I developed were used.

Compositing

Designed and developed a set of tools to tightly integrated nuke into our pipeline.
Created an asset browser tool to allow easy access to Footage, Geometry, Gizmos and import them into Nuke.
Created and designed an API that allow creating custom node that are integrated with our asset system.
This API was then used to create custom nodes like: 'Footage Reader', "Geometry Reader", "Gizmo Reader", "Camera Reader", etc///. All these nodes can quickly query the asset system and share a commen UIthat was dynamically created using PySide.
Created a localisation tool for Nuke to package nuke scripts so that we can send the data to external vendors.
Developed a tool to easily view, update and refresh all of our custom nodes and display the data in a spreadsheet like view.
Developed a tool to migrate nuke scripts from one shot to another.
Created a gizmo sharing and publishing workflow that utilizes our asset system.
Sources and references: our asset system allow storing the source and data on elements and this feature was heavily utilized in the compositing workflow and provided an easy way to find what maya file create certain footage and what data was used in the maya file and presented the user with various useful information.
Other then tool development, I also helped create various gizmos and nuke script for various shows.
Managed the of new nuke testing and vetting the release and keeping the pipeline up to date.

Here is some Cinematics were the tools I developed were used.

2.5D Piepeline

Designed and developed a full pipeline to efficiently handle creating 2.5D cinematics.
Created a set of tools in Maya to easily extract cards and arrange them in depth starting from PSD file.
Created tools in Maya and Nuke to transfer projection setup from Maya into nuke to keep the workflow fast.
This pipeline was then used to produce hundreds of shot and a dozen of shows.
After creating all these tools we ended up needing a full time person to support this department and hired a new TD who is now dedicated to supporting this department and keeps improving the pipeline.