Harry Potter 6 : Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Again the film has not been released so not much can be said.
Harry Potter 6 : Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was the second Harry Potter I had worked on personally
Working on a Potter film is an exciting experience as you know your work will be seen and you know that it has been professionally shot and the plot is all there, which is a good foundation for good visual effects.
We improved the CGI pipeline dramatically for this film as there were a number of shots that included a high expectation from the CGI elements.
I helped out initally by modifying our current "one size fits all" shader to include features such as subsurface scattering and raytraced reflection and refraction, which had been used on previous projects without being unified.
I created a pipeline tool was created to store the numerous shader and geometric attributes required to make this monolithic shader work. This along with pipeline tools for; modelling, rigging, animation, caching and rendering made a solid foundation at the outset of the project which has been inherited by other projects. I helped implement the caching solution which is still undergoing improvement.
Once the shaders and pipeline were stable, I helped support work between the various departments using the tools and undertook testing. This development phase drew to an end in the first quarter of the year.
From the first quarter until the completion of the show, I spent most of the time on a lighting and asset managing single shot with a large amount of CGI that needed to look photorealistic along with sundry pieces of lighting.
I am very please with the result, but that shot went through a lot of iterations and each one of them had thier own caveats which made it less than routine. This is to be expected on an emerging pipeline tested to its limits
