Ready Player One - Overlook Hotel - The Shining

Ready Player One was one of my career highlights. My responsibility was to supervise all Texture and Lookdev work done by the ILM Singapore studio, which had about 40% of ILM's total award on the show, and included several full CG environments, together with around 750 assets for the Singapore team alone!

For hand's on responsibility, a big part of my job for environments was defining the approach to texturing and lookdev and working on rough blocking passes which could then be handed off to more artists to push to completion. I would then have daily rounds with all artists in the team to continue pushing the quality of the work. The environments were always built in full CG, without the use of Matte Painting to give more options with how to use the camera.

My favorite sequence to work on was The Shining Overlook Hotel where the characters have to solve a challenge in a recreation of the famous hotel from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining movie. We had to make full CG versions of many of the iconic set pieces and rooms from the movie with added twists of zombies!

The Overlook Hotel asset went on to win a VES award for Outstanding Created Environment in a Photoreal Feature, which was the studio's first ever VES win.