Alex Evans at Umbra Ignite 2015: Learning From Failure

Caption notes

In this 2015 talk, Alex Evans recalls rendering approaches tried during the development of Dreams. He separates the sculpting tools from the renderer: creators could add or subtract basic shapes represented by distance fields, and the renderer still had to decide how to draw the result. He says that earlier approaches fell short of the art team’s painterly goal, so the team kept the distance-field evaluator and tried drawing the scene with small splats. The change led him to reconsider how the art direction shaped which engineering work was worth keeping.