I worked on Time Bandits as a generalist on a complex and highly conceptual sequence. The sequence went through a couple of iterations due to continuity issues that the client didn’t foresee when they gave us the initial brief. Because of this, we had to take the sequence from scratch to approved twice during the course of production, with the final version being this sloped hallway into the abyss.
For this sequence, I was involved with all portions of the pipeline, as we had to recreate all the assets from this cluttered child’s bedroom from scratch. We were able to model by referencing the LiDAR, then extract color textures using Mari and paint and look-dev what we were not able to project. Once we had the whole room modeled, we instanced the room in Houdini and passed it to FX to animate the wind interactions on the flowy objects.
The last major task I had was to sell the effect of the hallway disappearing as the characters slid down through the portal. I accomplished this by breaking up the hallway into smaller component parts that I could create as separate instance packages. This allowed me to cull the points we were using to instance the different packages using a progressively denser pattern based on the section the camera covered in each shot. This setup gave me the creative control to add or remove specific objects called out by my supervisors quickly. This section of the project also helped me gain a better understanding of how USD instancing worked and how to use it in production.