About the role
Flying Bark Productions is a dynamic and innovative animation studio dedicated to pushing the boundaries of character animation and storytelling. The studio is working on projects such as Avatar: The Last Airbender feature film, Netflix's Ghostbusters animated series, Stranger Things animated series, and Tales From Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan.
The Render Technical Director (Render TD) serves as the bridge between creative departments (Lighting, Surfacing, FX) and the render infrastructure. Responsibilities include auditing, profiling, and optimizing high-density production scenes to maximize image quality while minimizing compute cost, diagnosing complex frame failures, and fine-tuning samplings.
Key Responsibilities
- Scene & Asset Auditing: Inspect high-density production scenes to verify geometry (subdivisions, instancing), textures (tiled/mipmapped formats, memory footprint), shading networks, and scene graph traversal efficiency before farm dispatch.
- Troubleshooting & Technical Support: Serve as the frontline defense for diagnosing and resolving complex render failures across Surfacing, FX, and Lighting—including shading errors, memory limits/crashes, render locks, and visual artifacts (e.g., fireflies, temporal noise, aliasing).
- Optimization & Sampling Fine-Tuning: Analyze shot setups and adjust sampling, ray depths, and light thresholds tailored to specific asset, sets and sequences, to achieve target frame budgets.
- Performance Profiling & Systems Diagnostics: Profile scenes for CPU resource utilization, I/O bandwidth, and memory consumption. Utilize engine logs, diagnostics, and profilers to isolate performance bottlenecks.
- Tool Development & Automation: Build, refine, and maintain internal department tools and scripts using Python and Lua to streamline render pass setups, custom AOVs, secondary outputs, and automated denoising workflows.
- Ray Tracing & Shading Customization (Good to have): Leverage a deep understanding of light transport, sampling distributions, and ray-tracing algorithms to write or modify custom shaders (OSL, C++) and manipulate ray behavior for specialized production needs.
Technical Qualifications & Experience
- Production Experience: 6 years of experience in feature animation or visual effects acting as a Render TD, Lighting TD, or Pipeline TD.
- Core Render Engines: Deep operational knowledge of modern production ray-tracers (e.g. Renderman, Arnold or Karma).
- Software Suite: Proficiency in DCC platforms including Katana and Nuke. Strong familiarity with scene graph structures.
- Profiling & Debugging: Hands-on experience reading render logs, identifying memory leaks/spikes, or debuggers (Native DCC engine profilers).
- Underlying Fundamentals: Solid foundation in computer graphics principles—including Monte Carlo sampling, BVH acceleration, color management (ACES/OCIO), and system resource limits (RAM/VRAM/IOPS).
Bonus / Desired Skills
- Experience with volumetric shaders, or utility nodes in OSL or C++.
- Familiarity with queue management platforms such as Pixar Tractor.
- Academic background in Computer Science, Computer Graphics, Physics, or Mathematics.
Company Information
Flying Bark Productions is a renowned independent producer of family-focused animation entertainment. For over 50 years, the 2D and 3D production facility has created award-winning feature films and TV series.
Benefits and Perks
- Facility: Industry leading studio space in Alexandria, complete with a cinema, quiet room, Zen Garden, games room, and state of the art animation facilities.
- Food & Social: Daily breakfast provided. Regular events including cake days, movie nights, wrap parties, and a culture club social calendar.
- Community: Paws for a Cause fundraising arm supporting charities such as Beyond Blue, RSPCA and the Cancer Council.
- Pet Friendly: Dogs are often present in the studio.
- Work-Life Balance: Hybrid approach to work with flexible work from home days.
- Development: Training and support opportunities for career development.
- Wellbeing: Access to mental health resources and free counselling via Support Act. Holistic support through discounted health insurance with Bupa, financial wellbeing initiatives from Media Super, and access to staff qualified in Mental Health First Aid.
Flying Bark Productions is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.