I’m currently gainfully employed as a 3D artist at Territory Studio in London.
I love solving problems with computers, principally with Houdini, and I’ve been in the industry for quite a while.
I’m practically focussed, with time on the box having always been a key measure of personal satisfaction, but I’m not averse to leading a team or helping others to reach their goals. I LOVE talking shop and figuring out a plan of attack.
Everyone appreciates a nice visual, absolutely, but as time passes I’m as happy digging into process as I am scrutinizing the end result.
A given week might include programming extremely specific particle behavior and easing animation curves, or finding ways to distribute the format conversion of 20,000 images and automating the splitting of 40k texture maps into UDIM tiles for handing off to Nuke.
Nuke is neat, as is colour management. One morning not so long ago I picked up Maya for the first time in a while, before writing a shader conversion tool with Python for the following morning.
I had one foot in the web for ages, both in the front and back end. Highly animated Flash UIs with tiny fonts were all the rage for a bit, which seems so niave now but in the same breath all the noodling probably played a significant part in what creative coding is today. Database design? I’ve tried that too, when I’ve had to. I may even return to the web one day, if it’ll have me. The last thing I wrote was a React app when React was a fresh new thing. How time flies.
So if I don’t know it today, I’ll learn it by tomorrow.
My free time is spent either with my family, baking bread or swimming, or making up for paying insufficient attention in adolescent math class.
The importance of mathematics is something that many artists arrive at at one point or another, and having arrived I’m keen to make up for lost time.
I occasionally post things on Twitter (x), in an effort to contribute to the CG community. That said, what with the way the world is now turning I’m moving away from Twitter and trying to put things up here instead.
Other than that you might find me on the CGWiki Discord channel, trying hard to be amusing but ultimately failing. It’s very nice there.
Cheers.
nick@thiswebsite
London, E7 https://www.nickwood.io/ Twitter: @FridayMarch26th