Logoscope Inc. jointly hosted the workshop “Software Environment Setup and Look Development” in collaboration with the CG/VFX studio MARK Inc.
To encourage interaction among employees beyond their day-to-day projects, five cross-functional groups were formed by lottery. Each group consisted of three CG artists and one production manager (PM), for a total of four members. The workshop was conducted on a group-by-group basis, with Logoscope (instructor: Kamemura) and a PM acting as a moderator, guiding participants through dialogue while observing the CG artists’ desktop screens in real time.
All four participants’ screens were recorded and archived, enabling each attendee to review their own work afterward through video reflection.
At MARK, the combinations of DCC tools, renderers, and compositing software used in VFX production can amount to as many as 32 different configurations*¹. Each participating CG artist attended the workshop after freely selecting their preferred toolset. The session began with establishing a consistent color appearance across these diverse software environments through proper color management and environment setup.
Once the software environments were aligned, participants moved on to look development using a PVC (polyvinyl chloride) reference ball. They adjusted surface qualities such as reflections on the ball, the diffusion of sunlight, and the hue of the highlight (“highest light”). They confirmed how significantly material appearance changes depending on the look development lighting environment. Additionally, the workshop reinforced the essential role of color checkers, gray balls, and mirror balls when standardizing look development environments to scene-linear, which maintains a physical relationship to real-world luminance values.
Post-workshop surveys showed overwhelmingly positive feedback from participants. As illustrated in the chart below, all attendees achieved a solid level of understanding and reported high satisfaction regarding both the difficulty and comprehension of the material covered.
