Apprenticeship Spotlight: James Brady

We have been catching up with another of our Summer Apprentices. Here is what James Brady, Junior 3D Artist at The Mill, had to say.

Coming into the apprenticeship program, I was looking forward to working with a group of students to shoot a few live action sequences and composite in cg elements. I expected to talk as a group about the areas that each person wanted to learn more, and then formulate a curriculum that would incorporate hands on training for those areas.

Being enrolled in the apprenticeship program has allowed me to collaborate with peers from other companies that I have respected and followed for years. Seeing how other company pipelines work has been an interesting process for me in understanding my company's pipeline better and learning some alternative approaches. It also allowed our class to figure out what we think would be the best pipeline for us collaboratively. Asking students how they approach certain modeling or texturing techniques, for instance, showed me new ways to do things and reinforced methodologies that I have found to be most efficient.

For our project, I have taken up the responsibilities of primarily lighting/rendering and lookdev, as well as some texturing and matchmoving. Having graduated from Chapman University with a degree in Film Production, I was heavily involved with operating the Canon Mark II D5 for the actual shooting. Also on the shoot, I shot the HDRI which we will use for image based lighting in our scenes. After shooting the images, I set up the exposures, white balances and stitched them together, as well as painted out the over exposed hot spots and tripod in Nuke. Also, I took reference photos of the ground, which may be swapped out as a cg ground in many shots. I painted a clean plate of the floor, and used an alpha to displace a few specifically placed floor cracks in Mudbox.

After I shot our HDRI, I shot reference photos of a grey/chrome sphere for lighting. Currently, I am working on matching cg grey/chrome spheres to the reference images by tweaking the HDRI. I also set up a lighting rig in the scene which, when finished, can be be dropped into any scene as an asset for others to use.

When we get to the compositing stage, I would like to do as much render comping as possible, as I would like to continue to learn more Nuke comping. After I complete this program, I look forward to showcasing my work primarily as lookdev/lighter/compositor and get more work from my departmental heads in those areas.

Tad Leckman & his apprentices