Darin Hilton Art and Design

PIRATES 3

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 3

A sampling of my work from the film

Slide title

Waterfall concept painted in Photoshop

Button
Slide title

Another Waterfall concept painted in Photoshop

Button
Slide title

Concept trying to show the scale of the earths edge

Button
Slide title

Matte painting of part of the ice environment

Button
Slide title

Another view of the ice environment all the water and floating ice chunks were rendered in 3d

Button

Pirates of the Caribbean: At world's end

I was hired at Digital Domain originally to help texture paint the HaiPeng, a junk ship the heroes travel on to hopefully rescue Jack Sparrow from Davy Jones locker. Digital Domain at the time left Matte Paintings to the end of a project, the vfx shop focused primarily on creating high quality 3d assets and effects, Matte painted environments weren't held in high regard. I helped develop a Zbrush pipeline for displacement maps for the highly detailed wooden ship, using a combination of photo extraction and hand sculpting.

A highlight of working on the project was travelling to Palmdale north of Los Angeles where production was shooting action sequences in an old Air force base. Production had built a scale replicas of the Black Pearl and a partial set of the Hai Peng mounted on a big gimbal rig to simulate the ship rocking and eventually tipping over. I spent an entire day shooting reference imagery of all the props and details for our 3d asset. I got to spend time speaking with the films weapon master who showed me the amazing swords and guns they had built for the film. We also got a glimpse of the incredibly detailed maps and books they had created for the film The day we visited they were filming explosions and debris with background extras for the final ship battle I was surprised to discover that most of the 'cannon' were incredibly realistic foam replicas, built to save the actors from serious injury. During filming foam wooden plank chunks and splinters were fired from air cannons to provide 'safe' in camera debris.

Back at Digital Domain a beautiful scale model of the Hai Peng was built for wider shots but I think our digital model ended up looking much better, simply because it was so richly detailed.

Coming towards the end of the show I was asked by the vfx supervisor to provide several concepts of the giant waterfall that marked the Ends of the earth. I worked from scratch layering in imagery Niagara falls and shots of space.

Finally I designed an ice environment that would sit behind a sequence of live action shots. I laid everything out in Nuke as a 2.5 projected Matte environment. All of the shots had been 3d tracked and I imported all these cameras and a low rez ship model into the scene to create a virtual environment we could move around in real time, adjusting iceberg sun and iceberg placement for maximum visual interest. I would then run out roughs that we presented to Gore Verbinski, the films director for approval.