Jeffrey Vermeer

My internship and first real job as a Junior Technical Director!

I had 2 major projects I worked on at Minivegas, but I also helped out on a ton of projects we did!

The first project was a pet project of the CEO and it was to create a VR Amsterdam experience and use procedural generation to generate the city. This was a huge challenge, especially for how (not) experienced I was at the time!

The second major project was to setup and maintain a pipeline with Shotgun, to help manage tasks, do reviews and connect our various DCCs together.

Procedural Amsterdam was the first project I worked on, during my internship.

These days this project would probably be a lot easier and more feasible. Map data is much easier to get into Houdini nowadays (and probably is better quality) and Houdini Engine (or USD) makes "exporting" the results of your procedure much easier and a lot more optimized since it can support instancing. Back when I did this project these tools were either not available or not nearly as widely used or known.

Challenges and work:

• Houdini procedures:

• Map based city generator

• Instance data output for use in Unity
  Map converter

• Amsterdam facade style building tool

• Poly paint windows/doors/etc

• Flexible floor patterns

• Unity features:

• Instanced meshes – custom Houdini data reader

• Oculus rift support

This was the second project I worked on, after I finished my internship and got hired as Junior TD.

For this project I had to use my Python skills to make exporters, importers and validators in Maya, Nuke and add support for more file formats in the Shotgun Photoshop plugin. I also make pre- and post-process tasks for anything saved to Shotgun to do any processing we wanted. And finally I set up Deadline and hooked Shotgun up to it to render things out on our render farm. This was my first real experience with Python outside of Maya and Houdini.

Work and responsibilities:

• Research in pipeline frameworks and development

• Added functionality to Shotgun:

• Alembic Exporter for Maya

• Alembic Importer for Nuke

• Sync scene settings Tool

• Added more file formats to the Photoshop publishing tool

• Thinkbox Deadline integration