Justin Gladis - Nimona

I created the cityscape, animated BG traffic, pine-covered hills, and sky using a mix of digital illustration, 3d modeling + texture, lighting, rendering, and compositing for this early, vision-defining piece

I started on Nimona with a mission to visually explore early ideas, world building concepts, production design, and inspiration from illustrator Charlie Harper. In the film's hybrid world that features both futuristic technology and heavily medieval aesthetics, we needed to collaboratively discover a recipe using 2D, 3D, and the gray in-between to find the best blend of cinematic illustration. Our early work resulted in ideas that help the larger pipeline prioritize beautiful visuals over limited 3D tools. Find out more in the interactive art book.

Rendered Images in front with animated bg hybrid (environment featuring both modeled, rendered, and painted elements) behind that shows a project feature: gradual shift by distance into pure illustration

L O S = Level Of Style

One of my main explorations was to help discover, define, and lay out a scalable recipe to execute the gradient of detail between foreground, midground, and background objects. This became referred to internally as "LOS" or Level of Style.

Study - change silhouette and retain core characteristics

Level of Style 2 high-rise exploration showing graphic textures to imply detail for windows, floors, etc. This sheet features original designs and designs adapted from other team members

In-Progress BG Environment that features many of style hallmarks: abstraction for implied detail, large graphic shapes, and strong medieval silhouettes through a long lens (300mm).

Hand-painted building swatches to give both a graphical and bespoke quality. Imperfections added to the impression of an illustrated world.

Distant traffic was boiled down to the most graphic elements - dots

A daytime exploration mixing between graphic 3D to hand painted abstract BG

Developing in 3D as well as 2D. Many of these models would eventurally go onto play a role in the Set Extension team's re-usable illustrations and 3D environments.

Exploration on keeping energy, imperfection and gesture in 3D when trying for an illustrated look. Stripping out small noisy details like twigs or attaching berries to stems to see if people would visually fill in the gaps. Light is purely "additive", allowing local texture to carry the weight.

I sculpted, textured, lit, and rendered this study on based on a design from Katy Wu into an early tutorial for the Modeling, Texturing, and Lighting Teams. I tried to not just present philosophy, but also a potential recipe to show how to achieve the results.

The Set Extension team - Final BG Paintings, Environments, and Hybrid approaches

Beyond VisDev, I lead the Set Extension team in moving exploratory work directly into the final images with as few stops in between as possible. This is a collection of my favorites: using any and all 2D and 3D to get the Art right and result in a movie that has moments of illustration and magic. Environments, by any means necessary. While I am featuring my own work, I want to highlight the inspiring, wonderful, and brilliant friends who played a role on the team at different points: Olivier Dubard, Chris Wesselman, Eric Urquhart, and Brian Handler.

And even though this isn't focused on tools, much of the blended discovery approach seen throughout this page would not have been as easily achievable without intuitive 3d programs (Blender), realtime GPU rendering (Octane), and my trusty Nespresso machine.

A stylized bathroom. My mom is proud of this one.

A stylized 3D bathroom. Magic.

Lastly

Here is an assortment of unsorted studies, style exercises, explorations, and silliness.