I was selected to work on Nyad as a Lighting Artist because they were doing the lighting in Houdini, and there were not many lighting artists available at the time who had experience with the program. The majority of the work involved ingesting and rendering ocean simulations to replace the water in the pool where the characters were filmed.

The challenges on this show revolved around it being mostly outside the standard pipeline. The Clarisse pipeline was ill equipped to handle the ocean simulations, so it was decided that the project would be lit in Houdini instead. While there were some Houdini tools available, they were not designed to support lighting. As the show went on, new workflows had to be developed and integrated into the external pipeline that was being created for the lighting artists, allowing us to accomplish our work more efficiently.