Sonic Prime was the first show using Katana at Wildbrain. Most of the artists had no previous experience with this software. They had to be train and helped during production.
The lighting department had two teams, each one was composed of a lead, three seniors and eight artists. My role was to lead my team and achieve the creative lighting goals of the director for the episode.

Preparation

I had to plan episode to achieve deliverables. Following directors kick off and with the concept arts, I started by creating prelight: a pass of lighting for the different environment of each of the episodes. We reused and updated them as the show went on.

After selecting which shots were creative key shots, they were assigned to senior artists. They had to match to the color scripts provided by the design department. We had around 10 key shots per episodes. Their next step was to propagate their work on the rest of the sequences. To do so, one contact sheet was created for each sequence. That rough first pass indicated if our lighting was setup properly. Mistakes or issues could be checked before the artists start. It also gave us an idea how their shots should looked like.

New Yoke City

Alternate version of Green Hill Zone, the city is entirely industrialised and heavily polluted. Under a heavy red smog, the streets are illuminated by green street lamps and neons signs.

Lights in asset

This environment was one of the very first set I was in charge of. Made of tall buildings and alleyways, placing every light manually on every window was out of question.
The set was made of multiple instances of buildings. We included our light rig inside the katana look file of each asset. When our buildings were instanced, the lights were already positionned. I did that for all the building and other props that generate lights: street lamps, neon signs, etc.

Using template light material was useful in this case. It was also important to remove any type of contribution (transmission or volume) that was not meaningful.
The downside of this technique is that Arnold doesnt support light instancing. Every instance automatically brought multiple lights, and at the scale of the city, the numbers increase very quickly.

Filtering

Because the lights were always imported, keeping a clear naming convention helps us pruning groups of light efficiently.

asset_name
   └geometry
	└group_geo0
	└group_geo1
   └assetlights
	└spotlights
	└neons
	└windows

It was required to optimize our sequences. For example, in an aerial sequence with dogfight, we didn’t need all the neons signs to contribute to the final image. But we had to keep the green street lamps for the look of the city.

The team

Supervisor	Leads	Senior artists
Kevin Monnier	Ouirich Bounthavy	Jin Bae	Kolin Hansen	Shahin Mirakhorli
	Robert Matier	Sebastian Hyde	Supreeti Mann	Arianna Mao

Artists
Diego Castaneda	Ross Ovington	Gilman Lam	Annika Zapletal	Julia Zakharyan
Sophie DesAulniers	Julia Suen	Danielle Murray	Erin Helter	Faozan Salman
Erin Graham	Cheryl Taam	Tim Seo	Palanikumar Gopal	Guimo Gonzalez
Rachel Hui	Harley Bennett	Curtis Spies	Hamid Karimian	Irah Kaharian
Scott Leung	Kyle Christensen	Jenny Truong	Olya Karnes-Lotterhos	Chad Rempel

Still frames

Some prelights I was in charge of