Poseidon

Poseidon was Sylvan’s first major project in the UK and at MPC. His main task was a new shading pipeline built to work with Scanline’s Flowline fluid system. The result was DIGS (Diffuse, Improved Glossy, Specular), a layered, physically based shading system built in Mental Ray and the first full PBR shading pipeline at MPC. He also trained the artists to use it.

It meant solving some new rendering problems, including some fun hacking of the Final Gather file format, thanks to Mental Images sending over the source code. He later carried the same approach to DNEG, where it was extended in Houdini into a more general 3D masking system.

More than anything I remember Poseidon for the people and the friendships. A very talented crew who picked up a brand new system remarkably fast.