§ The Lab
AI workflows tested against real production work, posted as they happen. Some work. Some break. All real.
Rebuilt this homepage as a work grid with a modal lightbox — one model wrote the spec and the components, cheaper models wired and verified them, and I art-directed. The interesting part wasn't the code; it was writing the brief tightly enough that the first pass was usable.
Hands-on-keyboard time: about an hour. The rest was direction.
A beverage lighting study in Houdini, rendered with Karma XPU. The goal was rich glass and liquid under dramatic, warm light — a single hard source raking the ribbed tumbler so the whiskey glows from inside while the room falls off to green-black.
Most of the time went into the liquid-to-glass interface: nested dielectrics and where the meniscus meets the rim. The refraction there is still not perfect if you zoom in — a denser mesh at the contact line is the fix. Good enough to ship into the product-studies set.
A full CG car tracked and composited into real-world footage as a compositing exercise. The work was in the match move, the color match, and blending the render with the live-action plate until the virtual car sits naturally in the scene.
A stylized anime-inspired FX run cycle — procedural Houdini simulations with hand-crafted timing. The point was learning simulation-based techniques and folding dynamic FX elements into rendered character animation.
A green screen key and full environment replacement composited in Nuke. The environment behind the astronaut was built in Blender and rendered with Cycles, then matched for lighting, color, and depth against the keyed footage to sell the final shot.
A set of effects and simulation studies — particle systems, fluids, and procedural workflows. The goal was learning simulation-driven techniques and folding dynamic FX elements into polished rendered scenes.
A behind-the-scenes process reel of a CGI coffee scene, from blockout to final render — the packaging-visualization workflow end to end: modeling, material development, lighting, and final composition.
