Nicholas Lormand

Dogman [unreleased]:

• Worked with a vendor studio to deliver and receive production assets/deliverables.
• Created a tool shelf in Maya for the Animation workflow of the film.

Unannounced Short Film [unreleased]:

• Developed a plugin to read and export animation curve data in and out of Premo to help departments transfer work from other applications.
• Developed a plugin to import visual effects proxy assets into Premo. This allowed animators to choose when to get the effects, which reduced overhead for production staff and FX artists.
• Optimized viewport recording by creating a fast option that skipped unnecessary steps and used smaller files, without losing image quality, to make the process 5 times faster.
• Updated several animation tools to be compatible with the new Premo ecosystem which involved updating them to use new api commands to access and manipulate data within the application.

Kung Fu Panda 4 [2024]:

• Developed a tool to allow artists to run a viewport recording from the terminal that included a Nuke composition for shots that were Picture-in-Picture.
• Improved a tool that uploads renders to Syncsketch so that the tool could safely merge videos from different departments and also include the correct audio, burn-in information, and formatting.
• Wrote a tool to unload assets from shots in Premo that are not within view of the camera to improve load times and playback speed. Often this would hide about 20% of environment assets.

Trolls Band Together [2023]:

• Developed a feature that allowed animators to store static and animated poses as controls in character rigs so that they could reuse those poses in any shot that the character was in.
• Wrote a script to copy animation curve data for all shots to allow animators to continue working seamlessly as production moved from one pipeline to another.

• Developed a tool for the render farm manager website to help artists create their own Jira tickets by filling in the contents automatically with details from the render(s).
• Updated and maintained a set of linux scripts that ran automatically at set times to provide a baseline of wrangling coverage for farm jobs.