'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' Shader writers talent extends to photography and portraiture.
CGSociety :: Production Focus 24 September 2009, by Barbara Robertson
People working in visual effects and animation studios often consider shader writing to be one of the most technical jobs, a job filled by geeks not artists. And, given a choice, it seems likely that any artist would jump at the chance to create a matte painting rather than write a shader.
Not so for Danny Dimian, computer scientist, CG supervisor, shader writer, portrait painter and photographer. Dimian would much rather paint algorithms than backgrounds, and his reason why might surprise you.
“For me, matte painting is mechanical compared to what I do,” he says. “It’s more about matching and less about interpretation.”
Dimian’s creative approach to shader writing is on full display in Sony Pictures’ animated feature ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.’ He was responsible for rendering and for the color pipeline. He supervised the structure of shaders. And, he was a sequence supervisor for lighting and compositing on several shots.
‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ opens in Chewandswallow, a pale, poverty-stricken town filled with hungry people. A young inventor in the town, whose contraptions always go wrong, decides to tackle the problem by finding a way to turn water into food. His invention works: Hamburgers rain from the sky. The town prospers and brighter colors reflect the happier mood and yummy food. But, the invention works a little too well – the food becomes bigger and bigger and ever more dangerous. Soon, the food causes major destruction, and the colors turn super saturated and as unreal as the artists dared. Skies are purple and orange and exciting, but not exactly appetizing.
“The artwork we received from the art department was about color palette, mood, and characters,” Dimian says. “The material properties and lighting were not really there, just an impression. We interpret that artwork. We translate the flat, 2D artwork that does not represent light into a 3D world in the computer where we paint with light algorithms and materials to match the feeling the artists painted from one specific view." This is the seventh film Dimian has worked on at Imageworks. He was CG supervisor for ‘Surf’s Up,’ shader writer for ‘Monster House,’ ‘Spider-Man,’ and ‘Hollowman,’ lead shader writer for ‘The Polar Express,’ and a lighter for ‘Stuart Little 2.” To light and color ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” Dimian worked with Imageworks’ version of the ray tracing software Arnold developed by Marcos Fajardo. “I was really excited to have the opportunity to use a GI [global illumination] renderer in such a creative way,” he says. “We did a lot of exploration into how to do highly choreographed, artistic work with a ray tracer, to constantly shape it to do what we wanted to do, to manage the rays to shape the light the way we wanted. The art director was particular about hues, ranges and colors inside and outside, so we provided more creative control in shaders and lighting that you might expect."
Monster House. credit: Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
Surf's Up. credit: Image courtesy Sony Pictures Animation.
So, you can begin to see why this artist embraces what some consider a purely technical role; Dimian didn’t fall into the rendering pipeline – lighting, shading, colors – by accident. “Rendering is an abstraction of the science of light and optics and all the things I’ve always been interested in on the technical side,” he says. “But, I’m not interested in it on its own. The primary reason is to understand more on the creative side. It really is the symbiotic relationship in our field. If you can tell stories, you can be entirely creative. If you come up with the color palette, you can be on the creative side. But, to make the right choices so people can actually create the work, you really have to be a link between the two sides." To nurture his artistic side, Dimian paints portraits and takes photographs. “I probably have 11 or 12 kinds of cameras,” he says, “from a Canon EOS that I use when I’m shooting reference photos or need lots of images, medium format cameras when I need images with a lot of information but I need to be mobile, and I always have a camera in my pocket or bag,” he says. “I’ve walked around with a camera ever since I was a kid.” Although he was born in Romania, Dimian spent most of his childhood in Calgary, Canada – all the way through college at the University of Calgary. When he was born, Romania was still behind the Iron Curtain and his parents soon decided to escape to a free country. However, the only way his mother, a teacher, and his dad, a geologist, could leave the country was if they left collateral behind.
“So, they took a vacation to northern Italy and left their expensive house and me to make it seem obvious that they would return,” Dimian says. “But, they didn’t. They hoped to get me out sooner, but it was four years before they were able to smuggle me out.” So, while his parents settled in Canada, Dimian lived with his grandparents in Romania until he was five. “He was a dean,” he says of his grandfather, “and she was a very smart woman, very involved with the university. They both worked, so all day, I would paint and draw." Dimian continued painting and drawing until high school in Calgary, when he had what he calls his Alex P. Keaton phase, referring to the character in the TV show ‘Family Ties.’ “I was all about math and science and what was provable,” he says. “Art classes and shop classes in high school were treated as remedial programs for people who couldn’t do math or science. They felt like a place for losers. So, I know it sounds mean and dumb now, but I wanted to prove I could do math. I think I missed a lot because of that rebellion."
