The following is a small sample of the Pipeline Tools Chris Browne has scripted in Python.
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SURFACING SETUP TOOL:
This tool was created to help surfacing artists manage assets that have thousands of pieces of geometry. It allows them to easily organize their shader workflow without having to rely on the Hypershade, which is usually quite slow and clunky to work with. The Artist can easily select geometries based on fractions of names, or select geometries based on shaders. It can quickly create custom shaders that populate in the window, allowing easy access to manipulate them. It also gives the ability for artists to quicly assign shaders to selections of geometry. As most Surfacing artists UV Map in the 0-1 space, The tool has a feature that can quickly organize UV's on UDIM tiles automatically. |
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LIGHTING TOOL ~ RENDER LAYER GENERATION
This Video Demonstrates an Interface that allows the artists to build any render layers they need and auto names everything appropriately. The layers are populated with only the necessary Geos. All Render Elements (AOVs) are automatically created for each layer with all necessary overrides, settings and proper naming conventions. The Tool can easily create Mattes, Ambient Occlusion Casters and Recievers as well as Cast Shadows. |
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LIGHTING PRESET TOOL
This tool allows the lighting artists to freely light their scene, adjust all settings of any lights, and they can then export a JSON file that records all values and settings. The artist can share this JSON with his team. They can use it to apply all of these settings to their lights in other shots. It doesn't matter the number of assets, it can still interpolate and assign all values and settings. |
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CARD GEN TOOL
In order to populate Dense forests far off in the distance, it was decided to populate a lot with cards. This tool can take hundreds of assets, and it will automatically light them from all necessary directions and auto build render layers for each of the assets. The camera automatically frames each asset perfectly on each layer, no matter what the size of the asset is (a pebble to a palm tree). It only needs to be run once and then set to render. A comp gizmo is then created to handle all looks and times of day. This gets added back onto a card asset that can be driven by a master control to match light direction from the 3d set and Time of Day to the cards. |
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3D COMP GIZMO
This tool allows artists to comp elements within 3d space utilizing the world point position pass and a 3d camera generated from the render layer metadata (no need to export a 3d camera). An artist can simply click at any depth in the image and a card will be placed in the 3d space. It will even be matted behind objects accurately. The tool can also be used for projecting 3d gobo shadows, or creating 3d mattes for interactive lighting, and tweaking. |
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OVERALL LIGHTING AND FX TOOLS (Mack and Moxy)
This video demonstrates the various lighting tools and comp gizmo's created for the TV Series 'Mack and Moxy'. |
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COMP UV MAPPER TOOL
This tool auto-generates a UV AOV Render Element that can feed into a custom Comp Gizmo pre setup that allows artists to quickly create mattes that track with the object. |
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