About

My name is Lukasz Pazera. I was born in 1978 in Krakow, Poland. I am visual artist with PhD degree in fine arts and software developer. I got both master and PhD degrees from Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland.

I love both art and technology and as a result of that I've been pursuing traditional and digital artistic media such as drawing, painting, digital painting and computer animation as well as programming.

I have over 20 years of exprience in animation industry having worked at acclaimed studios such as Passion Pictures, Not To Scale, Nexus Productions, Axis Animation, Light VFX and Platige Image. I went through pretty much all stages of CG production but in the end I settled on concept art and background/matte paintings.

In the field of software development I worked as R&D engineer for Foundry, one of leading companies developing tools for VFX and design industries. We were developing KANOVA - hybrid desktop/VR sculpting application. The project was canceled but its alpha release is still available on Steam. I was also pipeline TD for Light VFX working on UI design and development of studio's in-house software suite. I work in Python for the most part but C# and C++ are not alien to me.

My journey started from early 1990's when I was in ZELAX - 8bit Atari demoscene group. We've produced 2 demos (Ray of Hope in 1993, Endless Dream in 1994) and a puzzle game "Cosmic Hero" (1993) which was not published at the time but finally saw the light of the day as a proper physical release after 28 years in 2021.

Being an artist myself, I've always been interested in designing and developing software tools for artists to speed up our workflows. It happended that my particular area of interest is in rigging and animation of digital creatures. Initially, the auto-rigging tools I wrote were to address the needs of my personal projects but eventually I started releasing them as 3rd party plugins named AUTO CHARACTER SETUP. I made 4 releases for Lightwave 3D back in 2001 and 2002 and then 3 releases for Foundry MODO starting from 2013. Product line was renamed to AUTO CHARACTER SYSTEM with the latest release for MODO that concluded in 2022. AUTO CHARACTER SYSTEM 3 is definitely a pinnacle of my software development efforts and cost almost 3 years of intensive work.

In 2009 I started my opus magnum visual project - DOGS OF ZONE. I began from still graphics but the project has been growing over the years and now it includes animation loops, interactive projection and recently also VR experience prototypes. In 2020 the interactive projection titled simply DOG OF ZONE was accepted to SIGGRAPH 2020 Art Gallery Program. I will keep expanding DOGS OF ZONE in future, the next step is developing VR experience further.

In the fall of 2021 I worked on "The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse" as background artist. The shortfilm received an Oscar in 2023.

In the early 2022 I returned to my demoscene roots. I joined OFTENHIDE on PC and I'm back with ZELAX on 8bit Atari. Going into full retro mode we are working on "Cosmic Hero 2" - a sequel to the 1993 puzzle game. Cosmic Hero 2 is going to be everything I wanted the first game to be but did not have skills or exprience to pull it off at that time. We hope to have a physical release of Cosmic Hero 2 before the end of 2024...

In an alternate life I would probably become musician, in this life I play guitar for pure fun.

I live with my wife and two sons in Bialystok, Poland.