Derek Flood
Associate Director Of VFX Lookdev & Lighting, And Head Of Creative Technology, School Of Animation
California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDerek Flood is an experienced VFX educator and practitioner with over two decades in CG animation, surfacing, lighting and compositing, and more than a decade teaching advanced look development and rendering. As Associate Director of VFX Lookdev & Lighting and Head of Creative Technology at the Academy of Art, he designs production-style curricula and runs a remote lab and automated render farm that mirror industry pipelines. He founded the StudioX program to simulate professional studios, mentoring student teams whose work has earned a Student Oscar and Comic-Con recognition. Derek combines hands-on studio credits from PDI/DreamWorks and commercial houses with technical TD accomplishments—like a surfacing texture import system and remote desktop automation—that boost production efficiency. Based in California, he’s known for turning classroom projects into career-launching work and for blending artistic direction with practical pipeline engineering.
8 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Animation, Computer Animation at School of the Art Institute of ChicagoBFA, painting, BFA, painting at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Github Skills (31)
animation10
plugin9
post-processing9
animated-gif9
usd9
webcam-capture9
autodesk9
scene9
maya9
color-management8
visual-effects7
nuke7
legend7
fusion7
computer-graphics7
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
sharktacos/OpenColorIO-configs
Aug 2021 - Dec 2022
An OpenColorIO config for ACES with added Look Transforms.
Contributions:8 releases, 1296 commits, 2 PRs in 1 year 4 months
acesanimationocioopencoloriovfx-pipeline
sharktacos/VFX-software-prefs
Aug 2021 - Mar 2023
Contributions:5 releases, 385 commits, 453 pushes in 1 year 7 months
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