Maya and the Three | Show/Shot Finaling

Maya and the Three is a Netflix miniseries directed by Jorge Gutierrez. I was part of the Show/Shot Finaling (SHF) team at Tangent Animation, where the show was created.

As part of the SHF team, my job was to ensure all necessary assets in a shot were set up correctly for final Lighting.

This included:

Animation Finaling: foot placement, no interpenetrating mesh, technical animation (weapon glows, prop animation, etc)
VFX Finaling: placement and timing of general VFX assets in shots (dust/smoke, sparks, magic, etc)
Set Dressing: placement of approved set dressing to fill out a scene (rocks, pebbles, weapons, torches, etc)
Troubleshooting: all productions have issues and problems that pop up occasionally, and this show was no different. Arguably, the one skill I used the most on Maya was problem-solving. Some examples of issues that I was able to help remedy or implement fixes:
- Point precision: Blender had a few issues rendering elements far from origin. We developed in-house fixes to remedy this, and the SHF team was tasked with implementing the fix.
- VFX cache trouble-shooting (usually just syncing issues between networks)
- Troubleshooting: all productions have issues and problems that pop up occasionally, and this show was no different. Arguably, the one skill I used the most on Maya was investigating technical issues, communicating them to their respective departments, and finding solutions.

Maya and the Three can be found on Netflix! Watch it now!

Animated set, hand placement, and rope animation to avoid penetrating geometry

Set adjustments to sell the speed of running. There were some CFX (hair) troubleshooting in this sequence, as well as some VFX adjustments.

I did some set dressing for Luna Island’s exterior and entrance, as well as some of the forest cliff area.

For this sequence I did the blade impact VFX placement. We had a library of debris and impact VFX that SHF could use for shots like this. Due to the quick motion in this sequence we also had a lot of issues rendering motion blur properly.

I animated the bed and pillows for this shot. There was also some motion blur issues with the swords that I fixed.

Chapter 9 had a lot of cool action shots and tons of characters. Due to the intense action, there were a lot of little tech fixes, floating characters, motion blur problems, debris set dressing, and VFX placement/timing.

One of my favourite sequences is when Maya is inside the dragon. I was tasked with manually placing much of the embers and flames in this sequence. The last shot in the above video had some serious caching issues that I helped troubleshoot.