We want you to get to know the heata team! So, we sat down with our Head of Production, Saad, to find out why he joined heata, what motivates him, as well as exciting projects coming up...

Tell us a little bit about your background

I am originally from Lahore, Pakistan. I started exploring 3DS Max back in 2005, CGI production for Arch Viz has always attracted me more than the VFX. During my 17 years in the industry, I have had the privilege of working with many big names in the CGI business, including Model Works, ThinkBDW, Box Studio and Fabric Visuals. Each one of them had a slightly different production workflow which has played a pivotal role in shaping my expertise which includes a blend of CGI, product design, technical development and project management. It is quite impressive to see how far 3D production has come along in the past 20 years. 

On top of this, I have a PhD in Computer Science, and I love to tinker with new tech - I am always curious about how everything works under the hood!‍

Why did you join heata?‍

Climate change has been a sticking point in the back of my mind for quite some time. I have witnessed its destructive effects closely in Pakistan during the floods of 2010, when the rivers swelled up and devastated the livelihoods of thousands of people.

During my time within the CGI industry I have personally seen the amount of heat that is produced from render farms. We used to have two giant chiller units working around the clock to keep everything cool and I can't even imagine the amount of electricity that was wasted just to run those additional chillers on top of the power requirements of the render farms. That’s when I came in contact with Chris and Charlie, I was completely blown away by their approach as it provided a novel way of minimising the carbon footprint, while ethically reusing the heat generated from heavy render farms to provide free hot water to hundreds of homes. It was a no brainer, I had to be a part of this world changing initiative!
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What’s coming up that you're most excited about?‍

There's a lot going on at the moment...We are looking into expanding our nodes with more powerful processors and we're also looking into including GPUs in our service offering, to enable real time graphics jobs, and also make broader compute heavy tasks possible, such as AI model training.

What do you love most about your job?‍

The working environment is great and everyone in the team is super supportive and understands the main objectives, which are:

- Bringing down the carbon footprint.

- Supplying free hot water to thousands of homes.

- Providing a render service that keeps the client satisfaction at the forefront.

What do you love to do outside of work?‍

I love to spend quality time with my family. Apart from that, I am an avid gamer - I'm playing Counter Strike 2 at the moment. Plus, consider myself a technology geek - I love to tinker with tech whether it's a simple smart phone repair or analysing a new cloud computing setup.