Founder: Sam Hodge, Adelaide South Australia
Sam has worked in digital media since the mid nineties with formal training in the late nineties. His Hollywood blockbuster Visual Effects career spans from 2002 until 2019. With roles including: Character Setup, Shading and Look Development, Computer Graphics Supervision and Pipeline Technology and Software Engineering. Before that he was working in Molecular Biology research, both pure research and applied in Childrens’ Health and Agriculture for the brewing industry.
Experience in visual effects production is found here: on IMDB
Why does Rotobot exist?
Rotobot OpenFX Plugin was created by Sam Hodge out of a need to get his job done better as a computer graphics lighting technical director. While working on a major visual effects feature film in 2006.
Sam was frustrated that he wasn’t able to present the lighting to the internal supervisor until he could get good video layering to put his computer generated pixels behind the actor in the foreground, which meant two things.
Waiting until rotoscoping was done
Or doing the throw away work to a low standard himself.
As time progressed Sam developed programming skills and completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Science at the University of Adelaide from early 2014 until late 2017 while working full time at a local Visual Effect Studio in Adelaide, Rising Sun Pictures. Where he worked from 2005-2019.
When the Computer Science studies were completed he took the newly found deep learning models and applied them to the problem he had in 2006 presenting work in progress.
This was in Late 2017 when Rotobot was conceived and Kognat founded around the strength of this product and since then Rotobot has expanded to use worldwide.