Thomas Stevenson Email & Phone Number

Wellington, New Zealand

Leading and developing high performance rigging technology.

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

Pipeline and animation tools development. Developed pipeline infrastructure to support the animation department. Developed bespoke animation tools while supporting show productions.Proposed and developed a solution for vehicle rigs used on Mortal Engines to deform large amounts of geometry while maintaining realtime performance for animators. This also allowed geometry to be independent of rigs, reducing the amount of assets requiring updates.Films:War for Planet of the… Show more Pipeline and animation tools development. Developed pipeline infrastructure to support the animation department. Developed bespoke animation tools while supporting show productions.Proposed and developed a solution for vehicle rigs used on Mortal Engines to deform large amounts of geometry while maintaining realtime performance for animators. This also allowed geometry to be independent of rigs, reducing the amount of assets requiring updates.Films:War for Planet of the ApesMortal Engines Show less

London, United Kingdom

Developing tools and software for the rigging department and character pipeline.

London, United Kingdom

Worked for the software department within the animation department to develop, improve and support the animation departments tool set and the studios character pipeline across multiple international sites.New software included a Maya embedded toolbox for managing the departments scripts and UIs, nodes enabling preview of crowd characters within Maya, tools for interactive curve editing and others.Helped develop an animateable rag doll system based on MPCs propriety PAPI physics… Show more Worked for the software department within the animation department to develop, improve and support the animation departments tool set and the studios character pipeline across multiple international sites.New software included a Maya embedded toolbox for managing the departments scripts and UIs, nodes enabling preview of crowd characters within Maya, tools for interactive curve editing and others.Helped develop an animateable rag doll system based on MPCs propriety PAPI physics engine, used on World War Z and The Lone Ranger.Developed the pipeline used for the Sentinel character in X-Men 4: Days of Future Past, integrating it into our existing character caching pipeline.Collaborated across departments with core software developers, animators, riggers and technical animators on many of these projects.Films:World War z47 RoninSeventh SonThe Lone RangerPercy Jackson 2James Bond: Sky FallRise of EmpiresMalificentX-Men 4: Days of Future PastGuardians of the Galaxy Show less

London, United Kingdom

Production Technology software developer, supporting and developing pipeline, third party and bespoke CG/VFX tools.Extensive work with Packaging, MPCs propriety asset management system, and work to extend features in MPCs FX scene building tools.Films:Life of PiJack The Giant Killer

Bristol, United Kingdom

Hired to work on a Sony/Aardman feature film, Pirates!Managed a 200+ node render farm of Sun, HP and SuperMicro blades, with Pixar's Tractor as the job dispatcher.Worked extensively with Tractor. Wrote software to allow a single Tractor instance to use multiple Renderman license servers by wrapping its configuration files, as well as various scripts to set up jobs, report on jobs, manage queues and record statistics.Pipeline development in bash, Python, PyQT and Nuke and… Show more Hired to work on a Sony/Aardman feature film, Pirates!Managed a 200+ node render farm of Sun, HP and SuperMicro blades, with Pixar's Tractor as the job dispatcher.Worked extensively with Tractor. Wrote software to allow a single Tractor instance to use multiple Renderman license servers by wrapping its configuration files, as well as various scripts to set up jobs, report on jobs, manage queues and record statistics.Pipeline development in bash, Python, PyQT and Nuke and Maya APIs. Built, modified and maintained various pipeline tools. Extended existing footage processing tools to reformat full-aperture plates to different resolutions for compositing.Extended existing tools for ingesting plates delivered from outsourcing. This allowed tracking of versions between the in-house pipeline and the outsource vendor pipeline I also added support for full-aperture plates and automated error checking on delivered plates.Debugged and fixed numerous problems with Nuke, Maya, Realflow and Houdini.Systems administration, DNS, DHCP, FTP and various VFX software license servers. Experience with ONTAP 8, looked after a HA pair of NetApp filers. Ran tape backups with BakBone NetVault. Show less

Postgraduate Certificate, Animation

Bsc (Hons.), Computer Science

British Computer Society accredited course.

Foundation, Art And Design