Patty

A Creature of the forest

June 2022 - This year I had the opportunity to be a teaching and production assistant for the 2022 Paul G. Allen School of CSE Animation Capstone. Repeating the program I had been a student in the previous year felt familiar, but was completely different and challenging ways I didn’t expect. The dual teaching/production supervisor role made it a demanding undertaking, combining the difficult task of teaching skills I had learned just a year ago to a team of absolute beginners while steering the ship on certain aspects of the film. I supervised the modeling and surfacing teams, managed interfacing with other teams, worked more closely with Barbara (the director), and kept a high level view to avoid mistakes we made on the previous film.

Spinning all those plates at once was a lot of pressure, but I’m proud of the result. Patty is a wonderful movie— the story hits, it’s built well and it looks great. The students learned so much along the way (as did I). This page reviews some of my key contributions to the film.

Lead Modeler, Lead Surface Artist, Instructor

My favorite part of working on this film was my position as staff supervisor of the modeling and surfacing teams. I got to share all of the things that I learned about modeling and surfacing with a group of exceptionally talented and motivated students. I made clear at the beginning that ZBrush and Substance were not required for the class, but almost everyone was eager to learn these tools. I prepared and delivered lectures on ZBrush, Maya, and Substance Painter, synthesizing my year of experience in the programs into the simple explanations and analogies that I used to understand them at first. My goal was to point out the essentials while removing unnecessary noise to make them more approachable. I loved watching the teams accelerate from absolute noobs to talented Zbrush and Substance artists in a staggeringly short amount of time. Making the lectures and answering student questions actually solidified and clarified the concepts for me, so I came out of the year much better than I started too.

When it came to actually leading the teams through production, I learned a ton. We began the year taking about an hour to get through modeling meetings and ended it closer to 15 minutes once I realized that we operated a lot faster when everyone had our shared asset list in front of them during the meeting. That asset list was also incredibly helpful to keep track of assignments and progress. I also got a lot of practice figuring out how to organize and relay direction received in staff meetings to the team member working on the asset.

I also see this role in Patty as a formative experience of my producer mindset, which I talk about more in my deep dive on Steep. Leading these teams through production delays, unexpected time sinks, and the ambitious scope of the project really stretched my thinking in how I approach this work. My perfectionism was routed— I learned to differentiate ‘good enough’ (at or above quality bar and easy for teams down the pipeline to work with) from the illusion of ‘perfect.’ Knowing when to let a student struggle for the sake of learning versus when to jump in and take something across the finish line for the sake of the production schedule was also a delicate balance. My brain began functioning like a GPS, always looking at our current set of circumstances and recalculating our route to finishing our work on time. I found the organizational challenge of all of it really exciting.

Turntable of all characters I supervised on “Patty”

While I’m not singlehandedly responsible for any of them, I did work on all of them, including sculpting, retopology, unwrapping, texturing and quality assurance.

Adult Patty: Evan McClure, Neha Nagvekar
Adolescent Patty: Kassidy Ting, Evan McClure, Neha Nagvekar
Young Patty: Jessie Huynh, Evan McClure, Neha Nagvekar
Raven: Steven Nguyen, Evan McClure
Deer: Neha Nagvekar, Evan McClure
Buzz: Jessie Huynh, Evan McClure
Newbee: Jasper Corcoran, Evan McClure

Building Futureproof Sets

The greatest logistical challenge I encountered working on this film was building the sets. Xavier and I designed them to avoid a mistake from last year: improper reference structure. The sets for Eleanor were created using a combination of imports and references, and then the sets themselves were imported into some shots and referenced into others. When we went back to revise them later, adjusting assets within them and making them consistent between shots was a bigger nightmare than the shark.

So the solution to that was pretty simple, just create a file where every set element is a reference and call it a day, right? If only it were that simple.

Here are the other inputs we had to consider when designing the sets:

Match the concept art, but only use approved models.
Due to production delays, do it in one week instead of the originally planned three.
No double references, because that breaks the render farm.
Stick to the layout because animation has already been done on it.
Maintain consistency in tree placement from one set to the next. If a tree survives the fire, it should still be standing in the same place in the end-film version of the set.
The state of the trees (Burnt, Log, Branches Only, or Needles) should be changeable in mass.
Optimize the files so they aren’t too heavy in the shot files. Pay attention to which trees are never seen on camera in each set and delete them.

A lot of fried braincells and midnight meetups later, we had a plan of attack, and Xavier made this wonderful graphic to illustrate our logic to the students:

Right— the students. At this point it was week seven of Spring quarter production, so we had three weeks to finish the movie. Most of the time when faced with a job this large, I want to find every possible way to spread it evenly across the available team, thus why Xavier and I put so much effort into communicating our system. But with the students deep in work for teams later in the pipeline and so many details to keep track of, we determined it would be more time efficient for me to do it alone. It was the hardest week of work I’ve ever had (watched the sunrise a few too many times) but I did it.

And it worked. When the final textures were finished six days before the screening, they were updated throughout the film with a few button clicks.

I would like to give a special shoutout to Oliver Abate, who is one of the most talented programmers I have ever met. While working on these sets, I could throw any (and I mean any) scripting task at him to automate, including:

a script that duplicates an object a set amount of times
a script to replace the references in local space using their world space transforms when I accidentally froze all their transformations
a SCRIPT to ADJUST the ROOTS of EVERY TREE to the NORMAL VECTOR OF THE MOUNTAIN <— absolutely MIND BLOWING

And receive a perfectly functioning script within minutes with a perfect explanation of how to use it. Working with Oliver is and always has been a highlight of the capstone.