I joined Troll VFX as a senior lighting TD in 2021 and after a couple of short project started working on Sisu, and ended up wearing two hats — leading the lighting of the plane sequence, and stepping up to lead the texturing department, which at the time was running entirely on procedurals with no proper texture pipeline yet in place.

The Lisunov plane was the centrepiece. Substance Painter was a huge ally here: baking out the curvature information of an incredibly detailed model gave us an honest foundation for where rust, dust, and moss would naturally settle. From there, an almost limitless library of masks and grunge maps brought the surface to life. The plane ended up with more than 60 UDIMs to hold up across both wide establishers and tight close-ups, and Substance's cross-UDIM painting was essential in keeping those transitions seamless.

One of the real lifesavers was the ability to automatically reproject textures whenever the model was updated — when the hatch was added underneath to match a plate, for instance, we carried on with the same texture set rather than starting from scratch. The handover from Substance's real-time viewport into Maya/Arnold was equally smooth, since the Arnold shaders were driven almost entirely by the exported maps rather than the Maya shading network.

It was a brilliant project to grow into, and the plane sequence remains one of the pieces of work I'm proudest of.