Remember that this work thread is about the fact that cg projects are rarely straightforward; one artist might look he’s not doing anything, when, in fact, he’s doing everything, and vice-versa.
My contribution to this commercial is intermingled with the fact that it had been animated, and its look set up by someone else to be rendered in Octane, a GPU-based, unbiased renderer, presumably to make rendering faster and more beautiful. However, it wasn’t faster, and it wasn’t that much more beautiful, as the look was mainly AO-like. Time was running out. We have a renderfarm that can render mental ray, V-Ray, LightWave, and After Effects; but not Octane. So, it was passed on to me so I can render and comp it in time. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t just about hitting the render button in LightWave.
I took the original assets, replaced everything with LightWave shaders, tweaked the shadows and diffuse shading so that they matched, as close as possible, to the original test Octane renders, and had to fix many of the errors present in the scene, as well a number of broken models. I strategised on how much needs rendering based on the animatics; I used Janus, the ultimate LW ass-saver, to breakout lots of the necessary animated elements and mattes, and rendered them; Richard and I did the motion graphics, and I comped everything for the final product in After Effects.
This hot-potato workflow, in which a project is tossed completely to another person to be rescued, is out of my control; I simply have to do it. The main problem I have with it is that few recognises it as that: a pawning-off of accountability and yet accepting the full credit for it (as such, I’m not credited). And, again, this is why this work thread is being written: a project like this would not have seen the light of day if someone hadn’t objectively dealt with the details that were required to actually finish the job to the client’s standards. What you see isn’t what went on.
There are hard facts in professional workflows, which some are in denial of. Workflows that fly against simple reason will not get them where they want, no matter how much they cuss or growl at the monitor. There is a lesson to be learnt here, but are those who need to learn it actually get it?