This week’s podcast guest is Robert Durnin, a talented and agile technical director who can turn his hand to just about anything. He’s perfected pipelines for movies including The Mist, The Amazing Spider-Man and Tron: Legacy, and polished in-engine cinematics for Batman: Arkham Origins and Crysis 3. He's also helped build content for the Leia 3D holographic display and worked out how to create a theme park-size XR experience.
Robert talks about his career so far, the numerous companies he’s worked for, including Digital Domain, The Mill and Magnopus, and how he’s wrangled multiple content creation platforms into working with one another. He also discusses some of the fun challenges he’s faced, and the computer-vision AI training he’d like to tackle in future.
Links:
Chapters:
5:15 Coiling cables and learning Maya: Robert’s background
13:27 Massive, Mental Ray and render farm management
17:53 Getting “Tron: Legacy’s” light cycle sequence right
21:18 Pre-DD on “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Mist” at CafeFX
28:01 Post-DD move to The Mill
37:11 Game cinematics for “Batman: Arkham Origins” and “Crysis 3”
40:47 Creating content for the Leia 3D display
48:37 Magnopus projects and working with handheld devices
1:00:21 Autonomous vehicles and computer vision