Blog

Sunday January 17, 2010

Starting Work

At last, a job!

As painful as my job hunt was I feel like it was worth the wait.  My new position at Reel FX Creative Studios is right up my ally. Officially I'm a Technical Director for the 3D Effects Department. Unlike some studios which muddy the terminology water, at Reel FX a technical director's purpose is to keep things running smoothly for the artists and (hopefully preemptively) solve the technical issues that arise in CGI production. In practical terminology its a lot of code and a lot of testing.




As the title suggests I work specifically with the effects department.  This provides some unique challenges stemming from the fact that the effects artist primarily use Houdini from Side FX. Houdini is a powerful 3D application that uses a procedural approach to create content. Which is all well and good except for the fact that the rest of the studio uses ye olde Maya. This means that I, et al have to negotiate the differences between these competing software packages. I'm like the ambassador of 3D.

Side Note: Coming from the Maya interface into Houdini makes Houdini look like a Rembrandt.