In 2011, Academy of Art University men's basketball alum Aaron Aikman was among the audiences viewing 20th Century Fox's revival of the beloved Planet of the Apes series. A mere five years later, Aikman found himself as HALON Entertainment's lead engine artist working on the trilogy's finale, War for the Planet of the Apes.

Aikman, a passionate Game Design major and high-percentage scorer on the basketball court, successfully balanced his role as a student-athlete at ART U and, just three years following his graduation, had a chance to bring his abilities to what Rolling Stone Magazine called "the most epic and ambitious Apes movie yet."

Armed with a bachelor's degree in Game Design from Academy of Art in 2014, Aikman initially remained local, working at an independent game development studio called Flatter Than Earth. In Aikman's time there, the San Francisco-based company focused its energies primarily on its debut title, Puppet Quest, a side-scrolling 3D adventure game for PC and console. As a technical artist, Aikman oversaw and took part in character and environment creation including modeling, sculpting, unwrapping, and texture refinement among numerous responsibilities.

To be closer to the woman he would later marry, Aikman took his skills to Southern California in 2015. That's when he discovered HALON Entertainment, and with it, the fascinating world of previs.

Previs, or previsualization, is the process of creating a visual representation for film, television, or games. Through the use of computer graphics, previs encompasses the strategy of imagining complex scenes in a movie before its filming has begun.

Headquartered in Santa Monica, HALON Entertainment is a full-service visualization company that brings together industry leading directors, supervisors and artists. Collaborating on film and television blockbusters such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Jurassic World, game trailers and cinematics, and even the occasional theme park ride, HALON has a wide variety of projects including previs as well as postvisualization (or postvis).

As defined by the Previs Society, "postvis combines digital elements and production photography (plates) to validate footage selection, provide placeholder shots for editorial and refine effects design. Edits incorporating postvis sequences are often shown to test audiences for feedback, and to producers and visual effects vendors for planning and budgeting."

At the time of Aikman's relocation, HALON was looking for an engine artist to spearhead the integration of real-time technology into its previs pipeline and he provided the perfect fit. The idea of "real-time technology" here can be exemplified by Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, software which, according to their website, "houses a world-class toolset and accessible workflows that empower developers to quickly iterate on ideas and see immediate results without touching a line of code."
 
On a day-to-day basis now, Aikman's role as a lead engine artist has him involved in a number of technical tasks from doing shaders, effects, and tools in engine to rigging, animation, and tools in the company's 3D content creation package, Maya.

"Depending on the project, I also do asset creation, research & development, documentation, motion tracking, and compositing work," said Aikman. "I would say that to succeed in this field, you need to be adaptable, able to troubleshoot, and have a wide range of art and animation skills."

When HALON reunited with its Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (part two of the trilogy) collaborator, director Matt Reeves, for War for the Planet of the Apes, Aikman contributed as a member of a 17-person previs team to work on a number of huge sequences in the film over a 10-month period. During this period, Aikman was primarily tasked with handling scene assembly, effects, and lighting as well as tools for managing cameras and effects in engine. Having developed proprietary tools and pipelines to render their previs in Unreal Engine, the team and Aikman were able to render large-scale scenes with numerous effects and huge crowds of apes more easily than with a purely Maya-based pipeline, serving as an even better tool to help facilitate Reeves' vision and direction for the film.
 
During the 11-month postvis process, HALON was assigned to polish several hundred shots from the film. Aikman helped to make this process possible by continuing to develop tools and effects in Unreal as well as working with others to track cameras in order to place them in the digital scene, light and render actor replacements and set extensions, and comp all these elements together in Adobe After Effects. When War for the Planet of the Apes opened the weekend of July 14, it would gross more than 56 million dollars at the box office, making it the sixth-largest opener thus far in 2017, and was praised for its visual appeal.
 
"It was exciting to be a part of a huge project with so many talented artists, especially because the film features a rich narrative as well as fantastic visual effects," said Aikman.

This opportunity could be foreshadowed by Aikman's dedication to his crafts as a student-athlete. A three-time PacWest Academic All-Conference and two-time D2ADA Academic Achievement Award recipient, Aikman remains third in the program's career field goal percentage (.534), fifth in blocks, and sixth in rebounds. He also serves as the lone Urban Knight ever to go a perfect 10-for-10 from the field, a feat he achieved versus Humboldt State on Nov. 9, 2013.

"Many of the values that Academy of Art encourages in its student-athletes carry over to the workplace: discipline, seeing the strengths of others, teamwork, leadership, and hard work," said Aikman. "Being an Urban Knight allowed me the opportunity to practice these skills while pursuing a career and a sport that I am passionate about."

As HALON continues to provide thorough and beautiful work for productions across industries, Aikman remains the reliable and bright self he forged as an Urban Knight.

"My advice to a freshman [at Academy of Art] would be to explore every aspect of game development and then focus on trying to master the role that most interests you," said Aikman. "Follow the fun!"