about

the first piece of 3d software i used was the cover-disk supplied version 4.0 of Imagine for DOS. in college i got into photoshop and after effects and 3d studio max, then on to the greener pastures of alias maya 4.0.

joining the 3d team at bugbox in 2004, i leaned into the technical things more, and because i am lazy, started learning how to code enough to get myself in trouble. there we did the wonderful adventures of toby animated short films, a bunch of commercials, and a music video or two. my roles were lookdev and lighting, shader writer, effects, saying smart sounding things (like coefficient of restitution), comp artist and being the weird goth kid in the dark corner touting linux. to my great dismay, i also got introduced to houdini around this time…

in 2011 i spent a year helping get loco vfx up and running, working with a small but severely talented team doing the vfx and creatures for the film mad buddies. we also made some cool commercials, as well as all the on set vfx work for 2013 tv film the challenger disaster starring william hurt. i built the linux workstation and rendering pipeline (including geometry caching, oh the days before alembics…) and tools we used for getting that volume of work through in time.

i was at ministry of illusion for a bit, then i freelanced for another bit.

in 2015, at pollen media we completed a kids science series called quarx for jasper james (walking with dinosaurs). there i built the cygwin based commandline tools and workflows for the team, as well as on set vfx, a lot of 3d, tracking, rendering, comping, all the things, all the time. it was an intense 7 months…

i joined luma animation at the end of 2015, as a compositor on the abc tv show of kings and prophets, and general pipeline implementer. they were in the process of adapting houdini as dcc, from softimage, and i assisted the studio getting up to speed. we did many commercials, a few bits on a few films, looked into vr like a bunch of crazy people, moved to a bigger space, adapted the studio to using ACES, did our first stereoscopic commercial for cinema (it’s gonna catch on!).

– let’s skip over covid… we were busy (we moved the studio remote in about a week) –

we then geared up for doing headspace. IT and i moved the whole studio over to linux, servers and all, and built the commandline tools and workflows for dealing with such a large production. we implemented opencue for rendering arnold out of houdini, with animation exported from maya, comp in nuke, editorial in resolve. over the course of production we expanded the toolset to touch all of the processes, automating as much as we could, which enabled a small team (25 at the start, about 5 at the end as artists moved on to other work in the studio) to complete the feature in time. we also did the vfx work for shaka and the afrikaans horror film pou for ergo in this period.

based on the needs of the studio, we moved workstations back to windows (yeay unreal), and looking into a more general solution to managing projects and pipelines (that don’t rely on a single sleep deprived nerd), i implemented the amazing open source openpype project locally for us to build on. we also moved rendering over to deadline. these things are an industry standard, and will be around for looong… so in 2025 we started planning the migration over to ayon, and implemented it at the end of 2025. trying to cut down on our reliance on subscriptions, we started building auto task updating, review, gannt chart time scheduling and tracking features into ayon, replacing ftrack and other services. over the last few years we also migrated all of our pipeline to usd. that was/is fun. now let’s hope the osl/materialX/openPBR thing gets resolved soon…

during this period we completed vfx, animation, editorial and post work on 2 seasons of netflix’s kings of joburg, bits of shaka s2, many amazing international commercials, many amazing local commercials, and a few unnamed NDA projects… as we all do. also, i spent the last two years getting acquainted with our robot overlords… i’d rather know than not.

it’s a process… i am looking into moonray currently, as the future of rendering is free…

and the boolean tool in maya still sucks…

what i do

• Problem Solving — for better or for worse
• Pipeline — i learn quick, and like a challenge
• Compositing — i get by, mostly
• VFX — lighting, lookdev, rendering, some sim
• Editorial — not an editor, but i work closely with them concerning all interchange
• R&D — i also like a new challenge

tools

it’s not like we’re dentists, our process changes fundamentally every five minutes. but mostly :

• houdini
• nuke
• maya
• most renderers at least a bit
• AYON
• deadline
• resolve / fusion
• python, some c, others
• linux, but also the other ones
• i’m sure there’s more, but who’s counting…