I worked as a technical director in the sets department. My tasks on this film were more general and comprised of several pipeline and optimization tools in Katana, plugins for RV, and performance related changes to render-time procedurals in the Renderman API.

One of the two main projects I worked on comprised of updating some of the light pruning tools. This film had several scenes with thousands of lights including street lamps, cars, and apartments, so light pruning is a low hanging optimization. There were several tools in place for pruning lights at different stages of the pipeline, and I worked on a unified toolset in Katana to automatically prune additional lights, or return previously pruned lights that had been removed.

I also deployed my “Gentle Breeze” keep alive system from Cars 3 on Incredibles 2. I also implemented some improvements to our render time procedural vegetation. The main change was the ability to generate the procedurals from non-render cameras. For example, frustum culling from the main camera, when rendering from an overview / review camera. Easier said than done, this project took quite some time to implement properly. Ultimately it helped us see exactly how our decemation and culling tools were behaving through the main camera.