Welcome to jrowellfx's GitHub Repos!

I have over 35 years of experience with computer animation, visual-effects production and software development. I've worked at a wide range of vfx-studios, from Pacific Data Images/Dreamworks, to Industrial Light & Magic, Charlex, Reel FX, The Mill, Framestore, Groove Jones, Harbor Picture Company and others.

Furthermore, I wrote and designed the underlying 3d Math libraries for both Maya (which was Alias Sketch! at the time) and AutoCAD starting with Release 13. If you've ever used the APIs for either of those packages, then you've looked at libraries and functions that I designed, wrote and named back in the day.

However, I've been a Visual Effects Artist and Supervisor for most of my career. Being an OG-artist I like to use the command-line on Unix-like systems for such work - it's ideal. Linux dominates the VFX post-production studio world, second in line is MacOS, and a few stragglers on Windows being the one OS that is not Unix based (unfortunate that it isn't Unix based, but fortunately it's rarely used in the VFX world).

Why does James Rowell have a set of github repos?

I have yet to find a GUI that works for ALL my needs when technical-directing a job where I might be compositing, lighting, FX, or whatever the task might be. Personally, having access the command line and a shell is essential for doing-what-needs-to-be-done at times. To that end, many years ago, I took it upon myself to write the quintessential versions of a couple of those very basic, yet necessary, command-line-tools that one invariably finds at all the big studios.

The main one being lsseq, which allows you to list the contents of directories (as close as possible to /bin/ls) while condensing image sequences down to a nice readable format. I encourage you to check out the lsseq repo main-page as I'd just be repeating myself by adding details here.

I've also included other useful tools that I've developed and used throughout my years on-the-box. In fact, at each studio that I have worked with I introduce my tools into their pipeline, so you might have come across them in your travels if you are also a VFX-artist.

What is James working on between gigs?

I have enjoyed providing my tools as open-source for the community at large. I like to continually (and as professionally as possible) maintain and improve the tools. When I find time between jobs, I like to go back and add features that I might have discovered were needed during my daily use on a gig.

I've written plenty of shell-scripts on top of my tools, usually hand tailored to the studio I'm at (for example, given their particular directory-structures) so my tools have been hammered-on in production for many years. That kind of usage, plus the unix philosophy of chaining simple well-designed tools together to achieve more complex tasks, has lead to the tools being what they are now.

Why sponsor James' work here?

There are a multitude of reasons that you might want to sponsor my work here.

• To thank me for having provided these tools for greater than 15 years.
• To encourage me to continue to support and develop these tools.
• To show appreciation for the support these tools are currently providing you.
• You are a post-production-studio and want to share some of the good-fortune that has come your way from using unsung-hero's behind-the-scenes work - like this.
• You are a generous and kind benefactor or patron, and want to see me and my art (including painting, not discussed here) flourish.
• You are Autodesk and would LOVE to throw me a little bonus since software developers don't get royalties unlike other writers in the world! 😀 I like to kid around that if I got paid $00.00000000001 for each line of code I wrote that got executed I'd be staggeringly wealthy.
• You're just generally wonderful and generous.

Thanks so much for considering supporting me and my work, and I appreciate your time here reading this story!