Two decades of high-end CGI across every subject a camera can't reach. From the inside of a living cell to the surface of Pluto, from prehistoric oceans to the deck of a modern carrier — each piece here is a full case study you can step into.

Explore the range: scientific and medical visualization that makes the invisible clear (Medical CGI); natural history brought back to life for Curiosity Stream, the Smithsonian Channel, and beyond (Ancient Oceans, Ancient Earth, Mass Extinction, Ancient Cities, Alien Deep); space and Earth cinematics for NASA and broadcast (The Year of Pluto, Earth Cinematic CGI); product and commercial work with photoreal precision (HP ZBook, Benelli USA); architectural and experiential environments (Audi Showroom, trade-show rendering); and defense visualization for the Smithsonian's Air Warriors.

Pick any tile to jump straight to that story —

how it was built, the pipeline behind it, and the final frames.

Photoreal 3D Medical Animation Explainers

Role: CG Supervisor & Lead Animator

For more than six years I've created photoreal 3D medical explainer animations, primarily for WebMD, along with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and biotech clients such as Genocea Biosciences. WebMD wanted a better way to explain medical conditions, treatments and surgical procedures — something warmer and more watchable than the medical content already filling the web. That brief turned into a long-running run of short-form videos, hundreds of them across live action and animation, and I led the 3D side of it: more than 150 medical explainers, each running about a minute. These animations were developed at Pixeldust Studios.

Nothing was templated. Each subject got its own treatment, and I kept pushing the look and the storytelling forward from one film to the next so the style stayed fresh and current rather than settling into a house formula. I was fortunate to see trough more than 80% 3d animations myself, end to end.

The work covers conditions across the whole human body, from autoimmune and inflammatory disease to cancer, heart, kidney, eye, respiratory and neurological conditions, as well as newer territory like biologics, genetic testing and gene therapy. For the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, that included visualizing DNA and allele sequencing.

My responsibilities:

- CG/VFX Supervisor and Lead Animator, taking every animation from start to finish

- Working directly with creative directors, scientists, producers and clients through reviews and revisions

- Evolving the look and storytelling film to film across a long-running series

- Look development and photoreal lighting that keep the body, inside and out, fleshy and real

- Animating every procedure, diagnosis and action-and-reaction moment, with fluid, soft-body and particle simulation

- Cinematic camera animation dramatized to the narration, with depth of field, focus pulls, defocus, motion blur and lens effects across every cut

- Real-time rendering in one pipeline, no render farm, 4K on quick turnarounds

- Final assembly: sequencing and cutting every shot, compositing the 2D graphics over the 3D renders, timed to the voice narration

- Final touch-ups through to textless and versioned deliverables

CGI/VFX Stack:

Unreal Engine, Unity HDRP, After Effects, Autodesk Maya, Redshift, Arnold.

The core challenge is showing what can't be seen. Each film has to explain what's happening inside the body, at the level of organs, cells and molecules, in a way that stays scientifically accurate while still reading clearly in a short patient-facing video.

My approach combines accurate 3D anatomy with cellular and molecular animation, showing antibodies, receptors, immune cells and DNA at work, while clean motion-graphic titles and callouts guide the viewer through each step of how a condition develops and how a therapy acts on it. What I'm after is a Hollywood-quality film shot with a tiny camera inside the human body: photoreal look development and lighting that keep tissue looking fleshy and real, camera work carrying the story across every cut, and fluids, soft bodies and particles bringing each procedure and reaction to life.

Quick turnarounds drove a different kind of 3D pipeline, and a fresh look with it. Instead of queuing frames on a render farm, I render in real time — the traditional farm is gone entirely, and with it the long waits for rendered frames and for compositing. Shading, lighting and compositing all happen under one hood, every shot carried through in the same place, which puts multiple 4K animations on screen at a high degree of photoreal complexity in record time.

The team around me:

- Science producers wrote the scripts, creative directors approved the editorial and art.

- 2D art directors & illustrators built the UI, labels and titles in Illustrator and Figma, which I integrated into the 3D

- In-house editors handled narration and sound design

Medical Human CGI montage reel.

Human body cgi medical work Web MD, CF Foundation from 2014 - 2022. Responsible for all animation, final lighting, shading, rendering and final compositing.

Medical Macro CGI montage reel.

Macro and molecular medical cgi work Web MD, CF Foundation from 2014-2022. Responsible for all animation, final lighting, shading, rendering and final compositing.

LIVE ON WEBMD: 3D MEDICAL EXPLAINERS

A selection of the 3D medical explainers published on WebMD's site and channels that I worked for as CG Supervisor and Lead Animator. Each opens on WebMD in a new tab.

Genocea Biosciences — Immuno-Oncology Animation

A short-form scientific animation created for Genocea Biosciences (NASDAQ: GNCA), explaining their T cell–directed immunotherapy. The piece visualizes how the immune system's T-cells recognize and attack tumor cells, and how Genocea's ATLAS platform pinpoints the right antigen targets — turning an invisible cellular process into clear, cinematic CGI for investors, partners, and patients. The animation was produced at Pixeldust Studios.

My Role — CG/VFX Supervisor

I supervised the animation end to end: developing the visual approach for the cellular and molecular world, building and look-developing the hero T-cell and tumor-cell assets, and directing lighting, shading, and rendering for a photoreal-but-legible biological look. I oversaw the cellular dynamics and micro-environment, ran final compositing and color, and delivered the locked shots — keeping the science accurate while guiding the artists and holding the visual bar across the sequence.

Tools

Autodesk Maya, Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, After Effects.

I worked as VFX Supervisor/lead for this amazing innovative 3d commercial for HP’s ZBook Power laptop. This project was done in partnership with Accenture & Pixeldust Studios. Responsible for all creative look development, lighting and rendering of environments and laptop adhering to Accenture’s specifications. This project was an extremely creative process from conceptualization to final finish, and explored many avenues and creative decisions to find ways to uniquely immerse the laptop and mirror its power & highlight features into responsive and dynamic environments!

The laptop was designed for architects and product designers specifically and hence it was key that the visuals resonated with the world that they live in. Lot of quality creative time was spent in look developing backgrounds and environments that were fabricated from shapes of buildings, structures and furniture. Using clever lighting and shading techniques, these resulting shapes and forms had to be revealed in an abstract form, in its optimum presence as the sequence progressed.

The laptop had to be visualized in various dyanmic angles, moods and lighting to capture its beautiful edgy features, and create an impactful cgi sequence that paralleled HP’s other signature Zbook commercials. Do check out the full length movies!

ULTRA DETAILED LAPTOP INTERIORS:

Another fascinating section of this sequence was the dynamic reveal of the laptop interiors. Micro-detailed features were rendered with precision and photo-realistic lighting and materials to visualize this circuit world thriving underneath the laptop hood! Using Unreal Engine 5 realtime RTX rendering it was possible to achieve high degree of render quality in efficient time frames and also facilitated quick iterations and tweaking for clients.

INITIAL LOOK DEVELOPMENT PROCESS:

These are some of the initial look dev renderings and conceptualizations for the environments that the laptop would thrive in. Lot of experiments were done with lighting, realistic PBR material surfaces, glassy reflections and color moods.

FINAL AMD ANIMATION:

FINAL INTEL ANIMATION:

SHOW LINKS:

HP ZBook You Tube Link.

Here i present some of my most cinematic photoreal shots of earth in cgi from various epic angles and lighting, done as part of various shows for broadcast for National Geographic, PBS, Discovery, Pixeldust Studios to name a few. Also included some photoreal dynamic cgi aerial flyovers of different locations.

Responsible for cgi earth creation, developing lighting/shading final compositing and camera animations. Hope you enjoy!

TapLane EdgePulse — Product Explainer Animation

3D Stylized & 2.5D Animation | Smart Mobility / ITS | Product Explainer

TapLane builds smart-mobility software for Intelligent Transportation Systems. EdgePulse, launched at the ITS World Congress, is their unified platform for monitoring and managing a city's roadside units, traffic controllers, cameras and sensors from one map-based dashboard.

TapLane hired me to bring the EdgePulse launch story to life as a stylized 3D explainer. I was responsible for all of the 3D and 2.5D work, about 70% of the film, across all four sections.

How the film was structured:

Hook — a smart city's traffic devices go offline and small failures snowball into congestion.

Problem — the daily struggle for traffic agencies: no real-time device health, disconnected tools, manual updates.

Solution — EdgePulse brings monitoring, alerts and automated updates into one platform.

Call to Action — from reactive fixes to strategic management, closing on EdgePulse and TapLane.

My responsibilities:

• All 3D stylized and 2.5D shots, about 70% of the film, across the Hook, Problem, Solution and Call to Action

• Previz and layout for each section, built from TapLane's storyboard and voiceover script

• Stylized environments and assets: a North American intersection, roadside units, traffic lights, vehicles, pedestrians and a traffic control room with operators

• Citywide sequence with procedural traffic animation and VFX development

• Ultra-wide hero shot for the Solution section

• 2.5D integration of EdgePulse's 2D UI elements, blended seamlessly into the 3D space

• Lighting, animation, rendering and compositing across the 3D pipeline

• Review rounds on Frame.io, retiming each section to the final voiceover

• Final deliverables

The core challenge was making software you can't see feel tangible. I built the world the story lives in, with a realistic but stylized look, as if the whole city were crafted from paper: a North American intersection, true to life down to the signal poles, pedestrian crossings and roadside control boxes, populated with roadside units, traffic lights, vehicles and pedestrians; a traffic control room with operators at multi-screen workstations; and an ultra-wide hero shot for the Solution.

Every shot came with its own problem to solve. The citywide sequence was one of the biggest: filling an entire city with believable, flowing traffic called for procedural traffic animation rather than hand-animating vehicles, along with dedicated VFX development for the citywide shots. Using 2.5D techniques, I blended EdgePulse's 2D UI elements seamlessly into the 3D space so the product reads as part of the city, not a screen pasted on top.

I ran the 3D pipeline end to end, from previz and layout through modeling, lighting, animation, rendering and compositing. Working directly with TapLane's co-founder / creative director and project manager, I turned technical product notes into clear visual decisions through regular reviews on Frame.io, retimed every section to the final voiceover and handled the final deliverables.

Stack:

Unreal Engine (RTX ray tracing, Lumen), After Effects, hybrid AI production.

OFFICIAL TAPLANE LINK CLICK HERE.

ANCIENT OCEans : CURIOSITY STREAM

WINNER OF Emmy AWARD AS ANIMATION DIRECTOR/CG SUPERVISOR @ the 2019 62nd CAPITAL EMMYS MAY 2020 : LINK

Produced for CuriosityStream @ Pixeldust Studios, Ancient Oceans dives deep into prehistory and explores the flourishing depths of Earth’s ancient oceans. We discover wild, wondrous creatures and the most monstrous predators that roamed the planet. While the continents remained a lifeless wasteland for nearly 4 billion years, the seas were teeming with life. A story of life, death and life re-born, the team visualized this complex underwater world through a captivating series of CGI-animated sequences.

This show is available to view on Curiosity Stream. LINK HERE.

AMAZON PRIME LINK HERE.

Responsible for team CG/VFX supervision, final lighting, shading and final compositing more than 20 plus 3d shots using state of the art realtime RTX technology with Unity HDRP & Unreal Engine.

TEASER :

ANCIENT EARTH : CURIOSITY STREAM

Ancient Earth is a three-part documentary series developed and produced by Pixeldust Studios. Created for Curiosity Stream, Ancient Earth takes viewers on a journey through time from earth’s earliest forms of life, through three major mass extinction events that occurred during the era of dinosaurs. A story about life, death, and life reborn.

I was responsible for team CG/VFX supervision, final lighting, shading and final compositing for more than 40 creature, vfx and earth shots. Established solid 3d rendering + compositing pipeline from Maya + Arnold to Nuke.

This show is available to view on Curiosity Stream. LINK HERE.

TEASER 1 :

TEASER 2 :

Nomination for Emmy Award at the 36th Annual News & Doc Emmy Awards 2015: 

Outstanding Graphic Design & Art Direction

It's a mystery on a global scale: five times in Earth's past, life has been nearly extinguished, the vast majority of species annihilated in a geologic instant. Mass Extinction: Life at the Brink joins scientists around the globe in search of answers to two of the most dramatic of these events — the "K/T Extinction" that wiped out the dinosaurs, and "The Great Dying," which 250 million years ago annihilated nearly 90% of all Earth's species.

Traveling from the mountains of Italy to the coasts of Spain, and from the wilds of China to the rugged Siberian taiga, investigators gather clues from ancient bones, clay, crystals, and rock as they attempt to reconstruct long-lost worlds — worlds brought back to life through detailed 3D animation produced by Pixeldust Studios. As different as the two extinctions seem, they share uncanny similarities and a sobering message for today: could the impact of human beings be just as devastating to the planet as an asteroid strike or massive volcanic eruptions? Narrated by Jeffrey Wright and produced by Tangled Bank Studios, the film unit of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the documentary earned a 2015 News & Documentary Emmy nomination for Outstanding Graphic Design & Art Direction.

This one-hour documentary explores the possibility of a man-made mass extinction. Pixeldust's Emmy-nominated 3D animations bring long-vanished creatures back to life and allow viewers to experience mass-extinction scenarios with striking accuracy and detail.

As CG/VFX Supervisor at Pixeldust Studios, I led the lighting, shading, look development, tracking, VFX, and final compositing across the shot list of Mass Extinction: Life at the Brink — responsible for that work on 90% of the shots, and establishing the look that let the CG reconstructions of ancient worlds and extinction events read with both cinematic weight and scientific credibility.

Much of the work centered on blending live-action footage with CGI to a seamless finish: complex camera tracking and matchmoving in Foundry Nuke, keying, rotoscoping, and layered VFX compositing to seat the CG elements convincingly into filmed plates. I also handled the underwater dynamics and simulation work myself, balancing scientific plausibility with visual impact, with everything rendered in Autodesk Maya using both Redshift and Solid Angle Arnold and finished through Nuke and After Effects.

A separate dedicated team of character artists — modelers, riggers, and animators — handled the character modeling, rigging, and animation that brought the show's long-vanished creatures to life; I carried their assets through my lighting, shading, look dev, tracking, VFX, and final compositing to a broadcast finish.

For this work, I earned a 2015 News & Documentary Emmy nomination for Outstanding Graphic Design & Art Direction.

Main software: Autodesk Maya, Redshift, Solid Angle Arnold, Foundry Nuke, After Effects.

The Year of Pluto is a NASA documentary from writer/director/producer Geoff Haines-Stiles (of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos), filmed behind the scenes at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and elsewhere over a decade-plus span. It turns hard science into personal stories and follows NASA’s New Horizons craft, which returned stunning close-up images of dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. At Pixeldust Studios, I supervised the CG for the nearly six-minute Kuiper Belt sequence, working one-on-one with Geoff Haines-Stiles throughout.

The core challenge was one of scale and form: digitally recreating the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud — two of the outer solar system’s most distant regions, filled with hundreds of thousands of icy bodies, more than 4,000 dwarf planets, and trillions of comets — in true volumetric form and faithful to real science. We grounded the recreation in real astronomical data: Tony Dunn’s Gravity Simulator point-cloud data from the Harvard-Smithsonian Minor Planet Center, together with vector images, which anchored the structure and placement of the objects across both regions.

(Read More below and look for official show links).

SAMAR SHOOL Responsibilities

• Supervised the CG for the nearly six-minute Kuiper Belt sequence in NASA’s documentary The Year of Pluto, tied to the New Horizons flyby of Pluto and its moon Charon.

• Led the volumetric recreation of the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud from real astronomical data — Tony Dunn’s Gravity Simulator point-cloud data from the Harvard-Smithsonian Minor Planet Center, plus vector images — deploying nParticle systems in Autodesk Maya to hold large volumes of point clouds.

• Directed the recreation of seven Kuiper Belt Objects from Tony Dunn’s data — digitally sculpted in ZBrush, then textured and rendered to a realistic finish based on planetary references.

• Set the realistic “space” lighting and enforced physically correct staging — keeping the camera always facing the lit side of the planets.

• Designed the camera language: carefully planned camera moves and Zdepth-driven fly-throughs between the Kuiper Belt Objects and their motion orbits, housed together inside the belt.

• Owned look development, lighting, rendering, and final delivery — rendering 10,000+ frames on a 70–80-node farm over 5–6 days of total render time, and compositing in Adobe After Effects.

To build both regions volumetrically, we deployed nParticle systems in Autodesk Maya, translating the point-cloud data into large volumes of particles standing in for the icy bodies, dwarf planets, and comets — enough to hold the science’s object counts while keeping the belt and cloud readable, and efficient enough to render at the scale the sequence demanded. Alongside the volumetric fields, the team recreated seven individual Kuiper Belt Objects from Tony Dunn’s data — digitally sculpted in ZBrush, then textured and rendered to look realistic against other planetary references.

For the individual objects, I focused on realistic “space” lighting and kept the camera oriented toward the lit side of each planet. To show each body together with its orbit, I used carefully planned camera moves and Zdepth to build fly-throughs that travel between the Kuiper Belt Objects and their motion paths inside the belt.

The finished sequence ran more than 10,000 frames. Pixeldust relied on its render farm — 70 to 80 nodes on Intel i-7 processors with 12–16 GB of RAM — for a total of 5–6 days of render time, with final frames composited in Adobe After Effects. The result is a scientifically grounded, volumetric recreation of the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud for NASA’s The Year of Pluto — two of the solar system’s most distant frontiers, rendered at true scale and paired with the lighting, camera work, and compositing craft that turns raw astronomical data into a compelling on-screen journey.

VIDEO:

SHOW LINKS:

Animation Magazine Article— Pixeldust Animates Journey to Pluto

NASA — The Year of Pluto (official)

Ancient Cities digital recreation for series “Bronze Age” available on Curiosity Stream. This project was developed at Pixeldust Studios. Proud to receive Emmy Nomination at 59th Emmy Awards 2016 in 44-Graphic Arts category. Awards link here.

CGI Renders of digitally reconstructed ancient cities showcasing lighting and compositing.

AUDI SHOWROOM

Architectural/interior walk through rendering for AUDI showroom. The project was developed for Pixeldust Studios.

Responsible for architectural 3d look development, lighting, rendering, compositing.

Air Warriors :

Responsible for shading, lighting and final compositing of aircrafts (F15, Osprey, Apache).

Also responsible for shading, lighting & final compositing/vfx of dragons.

Used Unreal Engine, Maya + Solid Angle Arnold, After Effects.

Benelli USA : Ethos Shotgun animation work.

Accomplished cgi shots showcasing Benelli's New product gun ETHOS regenerated in 3d in all its glory. Animations feature critical parts of the gun and easyloading, receiver and bolt mechanisms. These animations were developed at Pixeldust Studios.

Credits for lighting, shading, rendering and animation using Maya-Arnold. Showcased on Benelli website and their You tube channel.

Alien Deep is a five-part National Geographic Channel documentary series with legendary ocean explorer Dr. Robert Ballard, descending into the deepest and most extreme frontiers of the ocean — hydrothermal vents, undersea volcanoes, mid-ocean ridges, and the strange, resilient life that thrives in the crushing dark far below the surface. The series pairs real expedition footage with high-end CGI to reveal environments and scientific phenomena no camera could otherwise capture.

The 3D animation and visual effects were produced at Pixeldust Studios, where I served as CG/VFX Supervisor. On Alien Deep, I delivered a wide range of shots across all 5 episodes for Nat Geo TV — photoreal underwater environments and seafloor geology, rogue waves and ocean dynamics, ancient shipwrecks, offshore rig structures, the birth of the Hawaiian Islands, and the scientific visualizations that make complex deep-ocean processes clear on screen.

My responsibilities spanned the full CG/VFX pipeline — concept and look development, 3D modeling and texturing, lighting, shading, and rendering, and dynamic and particle effects (water, volumetrics, particulate, and bubbles) — through to final compositing, integrating the CG seamlessly with live expedition footage to a broadcast-quality finish. As supervisor, I also owned the shot pipeline and directed the artists on it, from breakdown and scheduling through review and delivery.

Award: Silver Telly Award — Animation (2013).

Architectural/interior walk through rendering.

Responsible for architectural 3d look development, lighting, rendering, compositing using Unreal Engine.

VR Walkthrough video:

Medical Animation

Animation work for medical, biological and more science-sensitive shows for Nat Geo Channel, Discovery Channel, PBS and more.

Responsible for final lighting, rendering and compositing. Softwares used, Maya, Arnold, Mental Ray, After Effects, Nuke.

CGI Artwork/ VFX

Animation work for various nature, creature and disaster shows for Nat Geo & Discovery Channel Programs

Museum Exhibits - National Geographic Travelling Exhibitions

Hidden Treasures of Afghanistan Museum Exhibit - Nat Geo Traveling Exhibits–Feb ’08: Digitally reconstructed the “Begram Throne” in all its glory using Zbrush and Maya and rendered using Renderman. Throne animation exhibited at several prime museums across the USA and Europe including National Gallery of Modern Art , Wash DC, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York and the Bonn Museum ,Bonn, Germany.