Hello there.
I really appreciate you taking the time to look at my application. I am creating this page to show how I can provide value to the team at Sphere from day one, and fit in perfectly with the culture. I will include some of my projects, my commercial reel and a little bit about me and my background. If you have any additional questions or queries, please feel free to reach out to me on ars@0000.dev or LinkedIn.
Background
I am currently working at The Mill as a full time Houdini FX Artist and a part time Houdini TD. I have been with The Mill for almost 2.5 years but I have been working with Technicolor companies for more than 4 years. Previously I was working in the Los Angeles and Bangalore offices of MPC.
I also have experience working in smaller teams. I worked with Honor Education for a year, which is a startup out of San Francisco, as a Motion Designer.
I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Digital Media: Motion Graphics from Otis College of Art and Design and graduated Summa Cum Laude. I also hold an Associate’s Degree in Computer Science from Delhi University.
Sphere Projects
Yes, it was my idea to drink Pepsi from champagne flutes in front of the Sphere when our spot plays. Watching people record the Sphere with our project on it was a surreal experience and so was looking at it for the first time. I also got to see Postcard from Earth and that screen is truly an engineering marvel.
At my time with The Mill till now, I have had the privilege to contribute to two amazing Sphere advertising projects. I had an absolute blast working on both of these.
On the Pepsi spot, I was responsible for working on the shots with the liquid pouring, cherries and the stadium. I was also responsible for working with the Creative Director and the CG Supervisor on the project to figure out the exact look of the liquid and the shaders of the cherries. Pepsi is a client which values quality and consistency in all their marketing material so we definitely had a huge challenge on hand as we were doing something for Pepsi on a format that they had not yet explored.
As for the Autodesk spot, I believe this was one of the earliest spots on the Sphere, everyone at the time was just figuring out how to work on a format like this with our pipeline. Although I wasn’t creatively involved with the team on this one, I helped in a lot of the R&D that was done on our end to achieve the amazing visuals.
Commercial Showreel 2024
Supervising Experience
Below are some of the projects that I have had the opportunity to oversee and work with the team to achieve the desired result in the most efficient way possible.
Lay’s Messi was a 2 week project, in which we had to make the goats, add fur to them, make them into crowd agents and then make it look decent. It was very time constraint as we had to release it on the day Messi announced he was joining Inter Miami FC. I was responsible for supervising the CG team and designing the final top view look of Messi made out of goats.
Fun Fact: Please don’t tell anyone this, the spot says there are 807 goats in it for the 807 goals of Messi, but there are over 2000 goats in the scene as the face didn’t look very good with only 807 goats.
TD Experience
Most of my TD work has been with Technicolor. I have contributed to their pipeline and made HDAs and tools that save the company time and money. I’d like to highlight one of the tools I have been working on recently.
At The Mill, we store the data for huge environments in XML file format, that has all transform values and paths to all the assets. These environments are usually used in pre rendered commercials but recently we had a project that was both a rendered commercial but we also had to supply a VR scene to the client in Unreal. So I made a tool that takes in the XML file as an input and recreates the environment in the Solaris context of Houdini (LOPs) and helps us export a USD file to import in Unreal. The tool also queries our farm Ftrack through an API to fetch shader information.
During the development of this tool, we came across some optimizations that have now been implemented which resulted in ~25% faster render times with Arnold and almost 10 fold improvement in load times and viewport performance.
Additional Software Experience
DCC - I spend a lot of my time in Houdini, but I am also proficient in Maya, Cinema4D and Blender. I have a lot of fun in After Effects and love trying new things in it, although Nuke is my go to for when I am working with CG elements.
Realtime - Proficient with Unreal Niagara and Chaos systems. Also, have some experience with Touch Designer and Notch, although I have not yet had the opportunity to use them in a commercial project.
AI - Comfortable with Stable Diffusion, Control Nets and AnimDiff. I prefer using ComfyUI but also proficient wit A1111.
Development - Python and Javascript are my strong suit. Although I am decent at working with C++ as well.
Misc. - Love working with Figma, Three.js, React, NodeJS and Swift.
Conclusion
I really appreciate you giving me a chance to interview. I think I would be a great fit for the Senior Houdini Artist role at Sphere Entertainment. I am passionate about pushing the boundaries with the visuals I create and sometimes we don’t have enough time to do that in commercials as they are usually constraint by time and budget, although it still surprises me the amount we are able to achieve with all the constraints. I would love to keep pushing that boundary and I think not only I am a good fit for Sphere but Sphere is the perfect fit for me. I will give my 110% to create the best content possible and create value for the Sphere.
Cheers!
Aryan Sachdeva
