Daniele Niero

Work History

• 

  Senior Tech Artist/Character Td

  Guerrilla Games

  March 2012 - Present

  Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

  

  
• 

  Character TD, Crowd TD

  Dr. D Studios

  October 2008 - June 2011

  Sydney, Australia

  Software used: Maya, Houdini, Cortex
  In Doctor D I have been employed to work on George Miller's Happy Feet 2, initially as Character TD.
  My main duty in this role was to build a Rigging System written in Python and working in Maya. I have also provided pipeline support for the rigging team, for example writing a library to help the department to communicate with the Asset Management software (called Tank) either getting or pushing data, for instance getting models to rig and push back the rigs done.
  Lately I moved in the Crowd Department to work as Software TD.
  In this department I worked more extensively with C++, writing important tools such as an animation database and a custom Skeletrical Structure as part of the set of custom tools we developed to handle crowds. This types of tools required high performance and therefore they were written in C++ and then exposed to Python through Boost-Python.
  I have also worked on pipeline related tasks thanks to my experience done in the Rigging Team writing the bridge to the asset management software (this bridge was also adopted in the Crowd department). For the pipeline I have been tasked to take care of the file conversion between the formats used within the Crowd department, the Mocap department and the Animation Department. The result was a set of tools written in Python.

  
• 

  Character TD, Rigger

  Animal Logic

  September 2007 - September 2008

  Sydney, Australia

  Software used: Softimage XSI
  In Animal Logic I worked at the initial steps of "The Legends of the Guardians". I mostly incapsulated some of they rigging techniques in C++ plugins for XSI.

  
• 

  Character and Generalist TD

  Passion Pictures

  May 2006 - July 2007

  London, United Kingdom

  Software used: Softimage XSI
  In Passion Pictures I was working with the role of Character TD but my duties included also different areas.
  I was responsible for creating rigs and developing tools for animation. I was also responsible for the pipeline from a technical point of view which
  means I was involved in the development of tools such as custom saving data, file import export, transferring data from animation scenes to rendering scenes etc.
  Particularly interesting is a project where I was involved as the main developer. It is a complete library written in Python to create human and animals rigs in a procedural way. I decided to develop it as not just a collection of scripts or commands, but as a complete framework, a dynamic environment capable of handling all the most common problems in creating a rig, from positioning bones to apply custom C++ nodes (or operators in XSI), from creating custom interfaces that expose all the channels that an animator has to animate, to ensure an easy and solid way to export and import animations from different characters. From a TD point of view this tool looks like a natural expansion of the XSI's SDK, making it very easy to get familiar with.

• Character TD

  Digi-Guys Ltd

  May 2005 - May 2006

  London, United Kingdom

  Software used: Softimage XSI
  I was responsible for creating all the characters rig. Digi Guys is a game company, so I had to create rigs that were able to work inside the real time engine. Here I created a system that allowed animators to work with the same rig and controls for game animations and full cg animations. I also developed a procedural system for building human rigs, written in JScript. The last project I worked on at Digi Guys was very interesting, it consisted in a custom intermediate exporter in ascii format, of geometries ( geometry data, uv, texturing ) and animations ( bones and matrix representation of their pose for every frame ) from XSI to the Game Engine. A different tool was able to read this information and compile it into the final file used for real time purpose, but this intermediate file enabled the artist to control the game engine in their work, and made technical people like me able to discover a potential problem in an animation or model, simply reading the ascii file and sometimes also to correct it without exporting the source again.

• Character TD, Modeller

  Proxima SFX

  July 2004 - January 2005

  Rome Area, Italy

  Software used: Softimage XSI
  Proxima was an Italian sfx company. Here I was employed as Character TD and Technical Artist in a small but very dynamic team, working on XSI. During the 6 months I spent in Proxima I had the opportunity to work at very small projects for Italian movies, either for cinema and television.

• Modeller and Character Rigger

  Animantis

  June 2001 - June 2004

  Rome Area, Italy

  Software used: Softimage XSI, LightWave, Maya
  I started as Maya modeller but very quickly I was asked to rig my own models in Maya and In LightWave. Slowly my role changed and I move from Modeller to Character Rigger and I started to work with professional programmers who taught me scripting and C++ programming.