Aaron Sims Creative
Stranger Things
Technical Director, CG Supervisor
Worked as a CG Supervisor for a series of re-work shots for Season 1 of Stranger Things. Wrote some tools for the lighting and rendering team to finalize shots.
2016-09-12 to 2018-06-29
The Mist
Technical Director, CG Supervisor
Created advanced rigs for running motion capture data on horses. Built spring driven rigs for the horse-riders to have a more natural secondary animation from the horses. Did the cloth simulations, rope and chain simulations, hair simulations. Managed a team of artist assembling shots and doing additional cloth simulations. Developed the pipeline for the studio and show. Animated, rigged and match-moved a zombie baby. Oversaw animation on both the baby and the four horsemen and the spiders. Rigged and oversaw the spider animations, and did the hair on the spiders.
2016-09-12 to 2018-06-29
Midnight Texas
Technical Director, CG Supervisor
Supervised the FX team. Created ghosts and smoke elements. Composited several shots. Rigged a demon and oversaw the animation team.
2016-09-12 to 2018-06-29
Technical Director, Pipeline Supervisor
Technical Director, Pipeline Supervisor
Created the entire ASC pipeline, based on the Shotgun system. Wrote custom DCC integrations, publishing and artist tools. Wrote many event listeners to handle everything from project creation to artist review notification. Wrote a DCC integrated Timesheet program that allows for instant updating of time cards for all artists, giving them to-the-second accurate project tracking and actuals. It works within Maya, Nuke, Photoshop, Mari, Houdini and any other DCC integrated into the system. Wrote mass-distribution tools for rolling out configurations across all projects. Wrote a Maya/Deadline turn-table tool that has one click functionality for artists who want to build complete lit and rendered turn-tables in roughly 10 seconds. Wrote a farm-enabled playblast utility and a farm-enabled dynamic caching utility. Developed a Dropbox enabled remote publishing utility that allows for artists to add things to their Shotgun pipeline from anywhere in the world.
2016-09-09 to
The Third Floor
Thor: Ragnorok
Compositor, VFX Artist
I did some pre-production post comp on several shots, and developed a pre-production effect for the death of Valhala
2016-07-11 to 2016-09-02
Nehza
Technical Director, VFX Artist
I modeled and rigged several weapons. Created shaders and materials and developed tools to manage scene materials.
2016-07-11 to 2016-09-02
TD
TD
Created artists tools for Golaem Crowd simulations, allowing for easy extraction of hand animations into crowd simulations. And developed tools for quick material renaming in the viewport.
2016-07-11 to 2016-09-02
Kid Robot
Crowd Sim & Character TD
Setup characters for Golaem Crowd Simulations. Created Golaem rigging tools for creating automated behavior clips from existing animations, and tools for converting traditional rigs into Golaem capture rigs. Rigged characters and props.
2016-07-11 to 2016-09-02
Gradient FX
Stranger Things
Nuke Compositor
Worked as a Nuke Compositor on several episodes.
2016-03-17 to 2016-06-30
The Last Ship
Nuke Compositor
Worked as a Nuke compositor on episodic TV show.
2016-03-17 to 2016-06-30
Fear the Walking Dead
Nuke Compositor
Worked as a Nuke Compositor on Episodic TV show
2016-03-17 to 2016-06-30
Masters FX
The Belko Experiment
CG Supervisor
Worked as the CG Sequence Supervisor. Created Nuke Pipeline tools for artists to properly log and render shots. Tools included templated scene builds, where an artists logs a shot number into Nuke and the basic comp is assembled with proper footage, write nodes and in and out points. Created a slate builder that renders proper slates, with artists names and running times, version numbers, et cetera. Supervised a team of 12 artists, both Maya artists and Nuke artists. Created a large number of complex CG integration shots, including match-move wounds, exterior environment shots, scene extensions, and practical effects integration. Composited CG shots, and chroma-key plate shots. Scripted production tools for assembling large quantity "monitor" shots from an EDL. Assisted with Shotgun pipeline and work assignments.
2015-08-17 to 2016-01-29
Pipeline Developer
Pipeline Developer
Created a pipeline system for Nuke projects that allowed for instant setup of shots, including read and write nodes, as well as for organizing shots and assets. Wrote some additional tools for Shotgun. Wrote a utility for creating multi-sequence "security monitor" shots. The utility would take a database of shot numbers and start times and build a security monitor grid with hundreds of little monitors in just a few seconds. Saved months of manual compositing.
2015-08-17 to 2016-01-29
Prologue Films
TD
Cloth Sim Artist
Created a cloth simulation utility for quickly moving cloth simulations from one piece of geometry to the next, allowing for one simulation setup to be ported across many different geometries
2015-07-15 to 2015-07-31
Destiny
Cloth TD
Worked as a cloth TD on the Video Game "Destiny". All work was done in Maya using nCloth simulations on a tight deadline.
2015-07-15 to 2015-07-31
Syndrome Studios
Ultimate Animals
Project Lead / TD
Created many quadruped rigs for animal animations. Developed several pipeline tools using Python. Created textures for many animals. Used Shave and a Haircut to create animal Fur. Setup lighting for various scenes. Created particle systems for swarms and fluid effects. Did a number of animal character animations, and managed the animation pipeline. Setup and managed final renders.
2014-11-03 to 2015-03-27
Fall Out Boy - "Centuries"
Sr. Generalist / Crowd Sim TD
Worked primarily in crowd simulations using Golaem and Maya. Created and rigged Roman characters for crowd sims. Did lighting, texturing and rigging on Roman Colosseum. Handled most of the camera tracking using SynthEyes. Populated the Colosseum with crowds and setup shots for final rendering.
2014-08-04 to 2014-10-24
Pause Festival Title Animation
Maya Generalist, Match-Mover
Match-moved plates, Created and Animated various shots and elements for integration into the plates.
2014-01-03 to 2014-01-21
People's Choice Awards Stage Graphics
Maya Generalist
Modeled, Textured, rigged and animated several various Stage Graphics for the 2014 People's Choice Awards
2013-10-18 to 2014-01-03
Disney XD Commercial Bumpers
Maya Generalist
Created graphic elements for commercial bumpers
2013-12-16 to 2013-12-20
EDC (Electric Daisy Carnival) Title Animation
Maya Generalist
Created a series of dynamic effects, including CG fireworks, Fluid Effects, Streamers, Butterfly swarms and Confetti. Also built several animation rigs and did some lighting and texturing.
2013-11-04 to 2013-12-06
Various Projects
Maya Generalist
History Channel graphics, Katy Perry Stage Graphics, People's Choice Award Graphics, Electric Daisy Carnival graphics. Work is usually between one day and three weeks at a time on various projects. Some projects I only work as an animator, others I cover the gamut of needs for the effects desired.
2012-09-14 to 2013-11-14
Katy Perry Stage Graphics
Maya Animator
Created and animated stage graphics for display at a live event. Used some mathematical formulas in a MEL script to animate many of the parts.
2013-05-20 to 2013-05-22
The Bible - Title Graphics
Z-Brush, Maya Artist
Created graphic elements for promotional content.
2013-02-15 to 2013-02-16
Millenium Films / World Wide FX
The Expendables 3
Sr. Nuke Compositor
Took several shots from start to finish on the compositing. This also included lighting, rendering and texture work on a 3D bridge. Animation on CG body doubles for Stallone and Gibson, as well as lighting and rendering on the characters. It included creating 3D matte paintings for the finished composite, as well as all the final compositing elements for the bridge sequence shots. I also did several blue screen keys and composites on a number of shots in a driving sequence and a bar fight sequence. Most of the work was done in Nuke, but some of it was also done in Maya and photoshop. One of the shots was deemed the hardest shot in the show, and was called untrackable. I had to hand match-move the camera for a zoom lens changing focus, hand held from a helicopter passing through smoke. It was a challenge.
2014-05-31 to 2014-06-20