Fabrice Ceugniet

Work History

• 

  Technical Director

  Genies, Inc.

  September 2021 - Present

• Assets Pipeline Developer

  Aquent at Apple

  September 2020 - June 2021
• 

  Senior Pipeline and Tools Developer

  Magnopus

  May 2019 - June 2020

  Greater Los Angeles Area

  Rigging tools and workflow related to confidential AR/VR project.
  Integration of Maya rigs in Reality Composer using USD pipeline.
• 

  Creature Pipeline Technical Director

  Method Studios

  March 2018 - November 2018

  Greater Los Angeles Area

  Maya plugins (deformers) refactoring and improvement, grooming workflow and production support.
• 

  Senior Technical Artist

  Riot Games

  October 2017 - January 2018

  Los Angeles

  Nuke and Maya tools development for CG Dev's cinematic pipeline.
• 

  General Technical Director

  Walt Disney Animation Studios

  December 2009 - September 2017

  Burbank

  Tool development on several animated movies for front-end departments (Modeling, Look Dev, Animation and Tech-Animation). Animation and Tech-Animation support.
  
  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• 

  Senior R&D Technical Director

  Sony Pictures Imageworks

  March 2003 - April 2009

  Greater Los Angeles Area

  Tool development on feature films.
  
  G-Force: Animation pipeline, support.
  
  Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: Development on animation tools "Silhouette" (1) and "PathIt" (2).
  
  
Beowulf: Work on animation pipeline and modification of proprietary deformer "spVertCache" (geometry caching) to match current production needs.
  
  Monster House: Development on tweaks library TweakIt (3). Rigging of a few props.
  
  Open Season: Rigging of vehicles.
  
  The Polar Express: Body rigging of "Cindy","Waiter", "Chef" and "Elf".
  
  (1) Silhouette : Interactive setup to tweak character poses. Animators sculpt in camera space corrective pose shapes they want their character’s profile to hit at a given time. Target shapes are added to a custom deformer (spOffsetBlendInterp) so the overall animation can adjust to the new set of pose fixes. (MEL/C++)
  (2) 
PathIt : Motion path tool which provides control over a character’s orientation and trajectory. Extra animation options include foot locking, time warp and overall time offset. (MEL)
  (3) 
TweakIt : Component of Imageworks' animation pipeline. Character rigs handle most animation needs but at times require custom deformations. TweakIt provides animators with a library of deformers to add shot specific tweaks. These fixes are fully integrated to the animation pipeline and can be shared across shots; they remain compatible with possible rig upgrades. (MEL)

  

  

  

  

  

  
• 

  R&D Technical Director

  Centropolis Effects

  May 1999 - December 2002

  Greater Los Angeles Area

  Tool development on feature films. Lighting work on some shots.
  
  The Matrix Reloaded: R&D work on flocking system (landing of sentinels).
  
  Willard: Leading of flocking system development. Setup of procedural animation of flocked rats. Lighting work on 2 shots.
  
  
Eight Legged Freaks: Lighting and rendering pipeline. Setup of deep shadowmap for rendering furry spiders. Lighting work on 5 shots.
  
  
The Scorpion King: R&D work involved with ants animation. Wrote Maya plug-in to move particles along polygonal terrain.
  
  Monkey Bone: Evaluation of a proprietary fluid dynamics software to simulate cloud animation (Houdini). Rigging of procedural roller coaster.
  
  The Patriot: Design and implementation of a crowd extension system for battle choreography purpose. Lighting work on 3 shots.
  
  Stuart Little: Rendering pipeline.
• 

  Software Engineer (Rendering)

  ALIAS WAVEFRONT

  April 1994 - July 1998

  Paris Area, France

  Worked on Render/IPR/Explore (1). Optimized rendering pipeline (3d clipping and tiling mechanism). Implemented some of Explore 4.0 features such as shadow mapping, displacement mapping (for 3D motion ride Dino Island/Iwerks), 2D motion-blur (custom development for Judge Dredd).
  Maintained core rendering library over three years. (SGI /C).

  
  Implemented hardware anti-aliasing and "contact shadow" projection using multi-pass rendering techniques. Implemented a few modules (track ball, zoom, change view) on Overdrive (2).
  
  (1) Render/IPR/Explore: Tile-based rendering package (A-buffer and ray-tracing) from the "Explore" product line, interfaced with an open shading language. The IPR feature allows real-time shader tuning of pre-processed images.
  
  (2) Overdrive: Multi-pass hardware render for the automotive design market (an AutoStudio feature). Built with Optimizer(SGI)/C++.



• Software Engineer (Polygonal Modeling)

  Software Excellence

  September 1992 - February 1994

  Paris Area, France

  Development on polygonal modeling package 3D Turbo (1). Wrote automatic meshing module (Delaunay tessellation without constraints) for terrain modeling from point cloud. DXF translator (Mac/MPW/C).
  
  (1) 3D Turbo: Polygonal modeler for architecture (Macintosh).
  https://turbo3d.free.fr/francais/Pages/Welcome/Welcome.html