Daniel Roizman has worked in the visual effects industry for over nine years, beginning his career as a Product Specialist at Alias® where he worked with the development team responsible for creating Maya® software.

Daniel has worked as an Visual Effects (FX) Animation Supervisor for several post-production facilities including Kleiser-Walczak, Simex Digital Studios and Spin Productions. He has worked on numerous commercials and several feature films such as The One, X-Men, Cyberworld 3D and The Rage:Carrie 2. Most recently, Daniel has completed work for Kleiser-Walczak on X2 :X-Men United and for Sony Pictures Imageworks on Matrix Reloaded.

In early 2000, Daniel created "the kolektiv" (www.kolektiv.com), a company conceived to assist visual effects companies in achieving their production goals. Through the kolektiv, he works with industry experts, such as fellow Maya Master Habib Zargarpour, to share advanced techniques and concepts with the visual effects community. Daniel has authored and produced five training DVDs for Alias and has also developed a suite of plug-ins for Maya that have been used in movies including X2 : X-Men United and Matrix Reloaded. His plug-ins are currently in use at studios around the world.

Q. How did you get involved in the 3D computer graphics industry?
A. In 1994, my cousin took me to see this really cool company where his friend, Daniel Szecket was working. The company turned out to be Alias, then known as Alias Research. Daniel gave me a tour of the building and a demo of Alias v2.4. About 2 seconds into looking at what the Sky Environment shader could do I was completely blown away and "wanted in".

I started in the Digital Media Lab where I peeled labels off stacks of old VHS tapes, worked the mailroom every Friday and any other time it was busy, filed documents, made photocopies and correlated training documentation. But somewhere in all of this grunt work, Tom Burns, then head of the department, managed to teach me UNIX, shell scripting, the joy of 2mb/sec scsi transfer rates, everything I ever needed to know about A/V and, most importantly, how to teach myself.

For the next four years, I was on the ground floor of cutting edge computer graphics technology. By the end of it all, I was a Product Specialist and part of the Maya software development team.

After working in development, I wanted to see what it was like as a customer. I picked up the phone and called my good friend Derald Hunt and managed to land a job at Kleiser-Walczak.

Q. How do you use Maya?
A. I'm a technical guy. The only time I pick up a pen and paper is to sketch out the dependency graph of an effect I'm working on. I use MEL to script out anything that involves repetitive tasks. If MEL can't do what I want, I'll write it in the API. If a PERL script is needed to tie Maya into a pipeline — the better. "Slap it in there", I say.

Much of the way I approach problems has been influenced by my having seen all of the thought and research that went into the development of Maya and its user interface (UI). If I build a custom UI for a tool, I try to make the UI follow the standard Maya layout and naming conventions. If I build a custom node, I try to make it as generic as possible so that it can be connected into a network of other nodes to solve the task at hand. In many ways, I feel like I'm just adding to the base package as opposed to generating ‘one-off' solutions, as if I'm still part of the development of the software.

Q. What projects have you worked on?
A. While I was working at Alias, I worked on Bingo, Stain-X and Roach-X, internal productions that were used to test Maya software's capabilities and push the technology. Since then, I've worked on commercials, ride films, and several features. The project isn't as important to me as the type of work involved. Being technically inclined, my enjoyment comes from solving difficult problems regardless of the project. That being said, I've been lucky enough to solve problems for X-Men, X2 and Matrix 2, as well as several other films.

Q. What makes this industry so exciting to you?
A. Innovation. I've found that if it can be articulated, it can be created. We may have started out with chrome spheres and water weenies, but that's because those types of effects had never been done before, so that's what was wanted. Now, they're asking for dancing hamsters, armies of soldiers and comic book superheroes complete with claws, tails and webs. Nothing is impossible, the 0s and 1s just haven't been lined up yet.

Q. Where do you see the industry going in the next 5 years?
A. Five years is an eternity in this industry. In the past five years I've seen the development of fur, hair, cloth, real-time fluid simulation and realistic rendering of skin. What's left?

Q. What words of wisdom do you have for anyone interested in entering the world of 3D computer graphics?
A. You may start your career working on toilet bowl commercials, flying logos and animated spicy taco seasoning packets, hoping to get called to work on the next Star Wars or Lord of The Rings. With hard work, you may get the call you seek and enter the well-oiled machine of a Hollywood studio. You will spend months working on an incredible shot, think about it when you get home, dream about it at night, lose contact with friends and family— because it consumes your every moment. You will finish the shot and look at it with pride, and say to yourself, "I made this, I made it." Remember this moment, savor it, because tomorrow your shot will end up on the cutting room floor when the studio decided the film needed to lose 45 seconds to make room for a new trailer.