← Ian Ward

What I Do

AI VFX & Pipeline

Bringing generative and AI-assisted tools into a real production pipeline — without losing the judgement a senior artist brings to a shot.

Twenty years of CG supervision means knowing exactly where a pipeline is slow, repetitive, or bottlenecked on a person rather than a decision. That's where generative and AI-assisted tooling earns its place: not replacing judgement calls, but clearing the mechanical work out from under them so a team can spend its time on the shots that actually need a senior eye.

In practice, that's a pipeline built around Claude Code driving ComfyUI for generation, running on a custom-built Linux workstation set up for remote access from anywhere — so work can be checked and steered without being tied to the machine in front of it. Houdini sits alongside it for anything that needs real procedural/3D control rather than pure generation, with some early Blender modelling work in the mix too.

Also in progress: a local LLM running as an extension of Claude Code, so the same workflow can run entirely offline. The goal is an air-gapped pipeline — one suitable for NDA material, since nothing leaves the machine.

The direction of travel is a genuinely hands-free pipeline — one that runs and reports back with minimal input beyond a visual review — and that's what's currently being built out. More detail on this page soon as it matures.

Character render generated through the Claude Code / ComfyUI pipeline
One output from the pipeline — Claude Code driving ComfyUI generation on the custom Linux workstation.