John Carter - Thark Ruins

The Thark Ruins was a full 3D environment which was enhanced with Matte Painting for the final look. John Carter (of Mars) was at the time the largest award Cinesite had received with over 800 shots including the build of three cities (one which walks), a fleet of Airships and several hundred props. I worked on this project for 18 months and it was my first opportunity to do a department supervisor role as Texture Supervisor, and also be involved in recruitment. On the project I supervised texturing for all Airships and props, and one of the environments (Thark Ruins). We integrated Mari into the pipeline as soon as it became available publicly and it helped hugely in dealing with the mega assets we had to produce. We used Mudbox with vector displacement for the sculpts to keep the base mesh low. My responsibility was to figure out best approach to texturing and then supervise the texture team at Cinesite. We used some tiled layers in the shader together with masks for dust and damage to break things up but keep the tiled flexibility.