I was lucky enough to compete in the 7 week national student competition BFX to produce a short 30 second animated film for a charity, we took a little bit longer to get everything finished but I’m happy with how it turned out!

My roles included

• Pipeline
  • Required me to write Python/Bash based tools to automate rendering tasks, such as handling the uploading of assets to the renderfarm and submitting the job on the farm itself.
  • Configure SVN on a network drive and encourage the team to use it as a remote backup/version control system.
• Shading/Lighting TD
  • Shader development & look development for the characters/environment.
  • Lighting multiple shots.
  • Our renderer of choice was Renderman 20.9 (RIS mode).
• Compositing
  • Involved pulling in the various render AOVs/LPEs and putting everything together.
  • Final grading tweaks.
• Director

This was my first time using Renderman for a full animation; while we did run into some bugs that caused us some pain, I would hope they wouldn’t happen again now I have more experience with it. I had a lot of fun lighting in it 🙂