The Task
Genies, Inc. needed to fulfill contracts to several large talent agencies to supply a “Genie” to celebrity talent who were interested in having a Web3 presence. The delivery timeline was aggressive at 8 custom Genies per month, and the team needed to hit an impressive quality benchmark.
My Approach
I lead a team of 8 in-house CG modelers in collaboration with creative, concept, and rigging departments. I identified pain points in the modeling teams’ workflows that were the cause of delays and had the potential to cause missed deadlines. I coached artists through finding more streamlined workflows in order to allow more room for iteration and feedback, supporting them further by building simple but specific tools with Python to alleviate some of the more manual tasks. In dailies, I presented the work to creative and implemented a different tool for giving more accurate notes for artists utilizing drawovers, rather than just written notes.
Results
Artists on the team were able to spend more time in iteration, gaining them one extra review round each week. With the extra round of notes from creative, the quality benchmark was consistently met. Artists also learned some new tools and processes, deepening their understanding of their craft. We often exceeded the goal of 8 custom Genie models per month, usually by 2-3 Genies.
CELEBRITY GENIES
"As a technologist, I was so pleased to work alongside Alexandra! Along with her keen artistic eye, she has a broad knowledgebase of all things CG, down to the nitty gritty technical details, and she was a wonderful resource when developing processes and tooling. Aly is also a fantastic communicator, a hard worker, and has the confidence to lead her team on any initiative you can throw at her!"
Devon Palmer, R&D Technical Artist at Genies, Inc.