Hey I'am Jan-Philipp please bear with my first ever blog post but I really enjoy dev.to and wanted to give some insights into a industry that is maybe not so well represented here! So if you are/were a part of it or want to know more feel free to contribute or ask questions!
Who am I?
Studied computer science and somehow made a start as an 3d artist and then got more and more into technical stuff and now I am maintaining a 3D VFX production pipeline for over 25 people.
Whats the industry like?
Stressful. You create images that others enjoy on the TV or the theater. You work with new technology very often since new projects require more advanced visuals. No one wants his/her tv show or tv spot look like every other show, so often people want something new. We have a research part within our studio were we work together with a local university to create new technology around the media creation.
For the tech part: nearly everything runs with python. Nearly every compositing or 3d tool got some sort of python integration you can work with. Python development is a real joy you can quickly pick it up and its clean and easy to read.
What I like about my job
The continuous joy of developing tools that save others time in there work so they can spend more time on the creative task. Don't know if that is our studio culture but you get a lot of respect and appreciation from your coworkers because you make their lives easier. That is a huge moral booster and keeps me diving deeper into development even after I though, a few years ago, I would never touch a programming language in my life again.
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So that is it for me. I would really love to read some other insights or questions. I tried to keep it short and interesting and hope that this worked!
Top comments (3)
Hi Jan-Philipp, it looks like a fun environment, especially because the market seem to be driving forward at a fast pace. Looking at VFX in older movies side by side with newer ones make this very evident.
Being able to contribute on a very tangible way the day to day of collaborators is definitely a nice place to be in.
What's next for VFX?
Is Python fast enough for your needs? I guess the rendering part is done by other tools, right?
Can you describe what sort of tooling you have build around these software products? Like format conversion or something like that?
Hey Rhymes,
The rendering part is not developed inhouse, we use royalrender for that. We are just 3 developers within our studio. The TD is developing the compositing pipeline and my job is the 3d pipeline. The third guy manages our inhouse web-based review tool.
I personally started out by writing simple scripts for autodesk maya for our artists to automate their workflows. Then I got into our project management software and wrote automated services that run on a server that helps managing our projects and artists. Currently we are working together for an automated workflow for pre checking renderings to save us time before even a artist took a look at the renderings.
Cheers
Edit: Python is indeed fast enough for us. More complexity-dense projects could be done with c++ but that was not needed until now.
Thanks for the explanation :-)
I'm glad Python is fast enough for your company