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HERE COMES THE SUN

HERE COMES THE SUN: Jessy Veilleux Wins October XSI Gallery Award  
by Michael Abraham

There are definite signs of a Blade Runner-like sensibility attached to Sun City, Jessy Veilleux’s award-winning image in the October 2002 installment of the XSI Gallery. Whether that’s my impression or his intention is, of course, open to debate, but the blending of pagoda-topped skyscrapers with a fiery sky leaves a palpable impression of a vaguely-threatening future.

“I’ve been intrigued by Asian architecture for sometime now,” says Veilleux thoughtfully. “When I had the chance to use SOFTIMAGE|XSI for the first time, I decided to create a futuristic Asian cityscape that would be simultaneously realistic and cartoon-like. It proved to be quite a challenge.”

As a digital matte artist at Hybride Technologies (www.hybride.com) in Piedmont, Quebec, Veilleux is no stranger to sweeping vistas and impressive landscapes. He not only creates them digitally in his day job, but observes them daily in the landscape that surrounds his home in neighboring Saint-Saveur-des-Monts, a delightfully European-style village that serves as a charming focal point for a variety of surrounding ski resorts. It is an atypically rural setting for a digital effects company, especially one with a pedigree like Hybride’s, the company that handled effects work for projects such as Spy Kids, Spy Kids 2, Napoleon and many more. It is perhaps also why Veilleux elected to create such a strikingly urban scene.

“I chose a wide angle view in order to give an impression of great scope and height,” he explains. “All along, I wanted to keep my scene light in terms of geometry and short in rendering time. At the same time, however, I wanted it to look complex and painstakingly rendered. SOFTIMAGE|XSI allowed me to do that. ‘Sun City’ was my first attempt using XSI, but I had used SOFTIMAGE|3D extensively and the change in system came easily to me. The new texture projection method in XSI, including the texture editor, was a tremendous help when it came to adding the tremendous amount of detail in the scene, without the need for overly complex geometry.”

Asked if any specific tools or features stand out, Veilleux clearly has more than one in mind:

“I used Final Gathering at the beginning in order to create some really nice shading,” he says. “By creating a render map, final gathering no longer has any discernible effect on rendering time, mainly because you only have to calculate it once. When you are manipulating light to create shadows, it is also very interesting to see your work virtually instantaneously, without having to render. Render passes are also extremely useful. Instead of having a different scene for each of my passes, I can have all of them in the same one. When you make a change in your scene, you don’t have to update it for every pass, since it is performed automatically.”

Congratulations Jessy. Soon, in contrast to the Artists Against Apartheid song of so many years ago, everyone is going to want to play Sun City.