Donny Rausch is living a geek’s dream.

Since leaving Lawrence in 2000 for a nearly three-year stint working on “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy in New Zealand, the digital artist was back in the states for no more than three weeks when he got hired on “Spider-Man 2.”

“You think of this industry as being extremely professional,” Rausch says. “But it’s really just a bunch of guys in a room, making pictures and laughing at things that they’re doing.”

On “Spider-Man 2,” Rausch further sharpened his reputation as a digital compositor.

“Compositing is basically putting everything together,” he explains. “You take all the elements — be it blue screen, dust, debris — and you mix CG (computer-generated) in with it and do all sorts of color corrections to make stuff sit together.”

In the case of this blockbuster sequel, he worked on some rather high-profile scenes. Among his favorites is a sequence in which Dr. Octopus (Alfred Molina) grabs Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) and climbs up the side of a skyscraper, then engages in a lengthy skirmish with Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire).

“There is one specific scene I’m proud of when Spider-Man and Doc Ock are fighting up and down the building,” he says. “They spin and they roll on one ledge and roll down, (Spidey) punches him in the face and they roll again. It was really a big shot because all the buildings were very hi-res. It was very labor-intensive as far as rendering and all the textures that go into it.”

Even though he was part of a team that won numerous Oscars for its work on the “Rings” epic, Rausch found the “Spider-Man” crew at Sony Imageworks a formidable ensemble.

“They figured out a really nice way of taking pictures of the actors and texture-mapping their actual skin onto the CG models,” he says of the departments led by John Dykstra and Scott Stokdyk. “They had this thing where they showed us the real Tobey Maguire and a CG Tobey Maguire saying the exact same line. It looked identical. I’d never seen anything look so good.”

Despite being invited by director Sam Raimi to screen the finished film beforehand, Rausch waited to come back to Kansas this week to see it with his friends and family.

“I didn’t know if it was going to be that good or not,” he says, adding that he often scrutinizes effects so much that it hinders him from enjoying a movie. “Then we saw it last night and I just thought it was fantastic.

“I definitely think the character is improved. If you look at one of the first scenes in (the original) ‘Spider-Man’ where he crawls up the side of the building, he kind of has this unrealistic quality about him. You can see the computer-generated aspect. On this film it’s so articulately done. There is so much done in the textures.”

The 27-year-old became immersed in a number of comic book characters when growing up in Hoyt, 15 miles north of Topeka.

“I was more of a Superman kid, but Spider-Man was always really cool,” he remembers. “I used to love to watch him on ‘The Electric Company.'”

Having completed the sequel more than two weeks ago, Rausch is still under contract from Sony. He says there’s a good chance he’ll go to work soon on “The Aviator,” Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Howard Hughes. Or he might end up on the animated fantasy, “The Polar Express.”

Whatever the project, Rausch continues to hone his digital skills and experience sights he never would have thought possible … including a few he wished he could have avoided.

“I was working on a scene with a computer-generated Aunt May,” he recalls. “There was a time when a guy who was lighting the scene forgot to put Aunt May’s clothing on her. I felt so very uncomfortable when I saw it. It was so well done that I felt like I was seeing an old naked woman. That disturbed me a little bit.

“But she had a nice body for an old lady.”