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The plan
A new kind of project
Senior Art Director at Invision Communications Jane Wight approached me about a project that I had honestly never done before. The plan was to create cosplay environments for “-gram” moments at Fanfest 2023. Essentially we would be building physical environments accurate to elements found in Final Fantasy XIV, and then wrapping them in textures we created. The problem: How to take 4k screen grabs from a game (3840x2160 @72PPI), repaint and design them to fit our CAD designs, with a require resolution of 25 ft x 15 feet at 150 DPI. Right away it was apparent that we were in for a technical challenge.
Project 01
Outside the box
The first challenge was to create a “skylight view” of an ancient city in the Final Fantasy universe. It was to be 25ft in diameter. All I had was a sketch, and some screen-captured video of a courtyard in the game. I separated the video into individual frames and painted out occluding objects. I then ran l merging processes in Adobe Camera Raw, and Photoshop. I took these results and up-scaled them using Topaz Gigapixel, making them approx. 10k files. Then I combined these results into a long panoramic image. From here I got a decent 30k resolution file, that I brought into After Effects. In AE I used a “Sphere-ize filter” which produced a circular image. This went back over to Photoshop for about a day of retouching and cleanup, and then back to Topaz for one more final upscale. Then back to Photoshop one more time for a bit more up-scaling, and cleanup. I was pretty proud of the result(which can be seen at the top of the page).
Project 02
UV UNwrapping real life
Up next I took a couple 4k game captures and upscaled them to create the library asset. I got a CAD file and took it into Maya. I created UV map info and then unwrapped to to make a simple template for the Library, After upscaling, it was about 18ft long and 10 feet high. I then gathered assets and began a series of digital matte paintings to “skin” the environment asset. The result was then mixed with practical bookshelves and other props. It looked great.
Project 03
a 30 foot monster
The next piece was Old Sharalayan Harbor. The process was mostly the same, I created a template and took about 45 4k game screen grabs, up-rezzed each, and created a massive pano. This needed to look good from about 5 feet, so the final file was a PSB that was over 6GB in size. The piece was then accented with a real boat, some prop harbor bits, and a massive statue that (through the use of creative lighting, fog machines and projection mapping) was “pouring” water into the harbor. The final touch was a projection map of an animated ripple effect on the water areas of the set.
made some friends
The Event
Finally I was flown to the event to document and photograph our work. There was nearly 100 people working on this thing, I would estimate. Over the weekend of July 28 2023, over 15000 fans (many in costume) bombarded the Las Vegas Convention Center with sheer glee. There were so many moments that ended up being purely surreal. One of my favorite moments was when a group of fans caught wind that I had helped design the “hole in the wall” art work. They actually asked for my autograph. It was kinda funny, and awkward, but I obliged. I mean…why not, right?