I’m Grant Rane.

When I joined XR3D in 2005, the studio worked in Rhino, Flamingo, and Microsoft Image Composer. Within three to four months, I had learned the existing workflow and was exploring what we could do next. By 2006, I was leading R&D in practice, before it became my formal title.

I studied the strongest work in the industry and invested about two hours a night in learning how to raise our own standard. I tested new methods on real projects, developed practical workflows, and taught the team. That included the move to 3ds Max, V-Ray, and Photoshop, followed by years of new rendering, animation, and AI tools.

A tool had to do more than make a beautiful image. I evaluated whether the team could learn it, how it would affect production time, and whether the improvement justified the cost. I led the testing and adoption of tools such as Forest Pack, proving the process before asking everyone else to change.

Some promising tools added too much complexity or time to be practical. My job was to weigh quality, speed, training, and profitability together, then choose an approach we could sustain.

I coordinated projects across the company while continuing to take on the most difficult work myself. I helped scope and price unusual requests, anticipated technical risks, and matched assignments to each person's strengths, capacity, and deadlines.

Competing client deadlines meant constantly balancing priorities and workloads. I ran morning meetings and reviews, hired and coached employees, worked through team conflicts, and coordinated with my business partner and our finance lead. As my responsibilities grew, I was functioning as a business partner before purchasing 50% ownership in 2012.

When rendering on individual workstations became a bottleneck, I learned how to network our computers and distribute rendering through Backburner. I set up the system, solved the problems, and made it part of our production workflow.

I also learned to build computers and, for several years, built the studio's workstations. I handled software installation and updates, hardware failures, troubleshooting, and malware cleanup. That responsibility continued as our infrastructure developed into a centralized render farm and remote production systems.

Our first 2D colorized floor plans were treated as one-off Photoshop projects. When the requests kept coming, the amount of custom work made them unprofitable.

I learned Illustrator, developed a standardized vector workflow, and taught entry-level team members to produce the plans. The work no longer depended on my doing every plan personally, and colorized floor plans became a profitable service in our toolkit.

Clients often asked for something we had not produced before. I became the person who researched the possibilities, tested different approaches, and figured out how to deliver it. I also helped identify likely problems before the work was quoted or assigned.

When the starting information was limited, I worked with clients to understand what they were trying to communicate and turn that intent into a concrete visual direction. Anticipating their needs helped reduce avoidable revisions and the time lost to misunderstandings.

I led the move to remote production, connecting Dropbox, local asset libraries, workstations, and a centralized Deadline render farm. I managed the practical details of how people would access their work and keep producing from different locations.

The transition eliminated office and associated occupancy costs while retaining the shared tools and production oversight the team needed.

I took on the modernization of XR3D's website and rebuilt its SEO foundations to help clients discover the company and understand what we offer. I organized our work into clearer service pages and expanded how we present animation, technical documents, and interactive 3D models.

It was another opportunity to learn beyond my original role and apply that learning to a business need.