Megha Davalath

Work History

• 

  Director of Production Workflows

  Spire Animation Studios, Inc.

  October 2021 - Present
• 

  Grooming Lead

  DreamWorks Animation

  August 2020 - October 2021

  Glendale, California, United States

  TV Holiday Special
  Responsible for all grooms: collected and communicated the simulation/construction requirements for each groom to groomers, led the achievement of creative goals, validated and enforced the success of downstream deliverables, and communicated any impacts to structure or efficiency
• 

  Co-Founder & Chapter Lead for TECHWomen

  DreamWorks Animation

  January 2017 - October 2021

  Founded the DreamWorks branch of TECHWomen in 2017 with a goal of increasing diversity & inclusion across the company. The mission is to engage a community of women and their allies with a passion for technology, professional development, and inspiring the next generation.
  Instituted a steering committee in order to create a more structured, sustainable, and scalable leadership solution
  Instrumental in organizing over 40 events that include talks, round-table discussions, networking breakfasts, book club, internal mentorship program, conference participation, special screenings and panels, external talks, outreach with middle school, high school and college students.
  
• 

  Character Technology Lead

  DreamWorks Animation

  January 2018 - August 2021

  Glendale, CA

  • Facilitated the vision for end-to-end hair technology and workflow solutions
  • Partnered with creative leadership on feature films to understand their goals and help bring them to life by collaborating between Technology and Research & Development
  • Guided design aspects of new proprietary rigging software and the development of a new cloud-based pipeline.
  • Developed training material and provided documentation for all relevant grooming workflows
  • Consulted with a vendor studio on grooming, rigging, and simulation workflows to achieve the desired look and motion for the main character
  • Organized and led the industry-wide “State of Hair in the Industry” Birds of a Feather at SIGGRAPH for three years, garnering participation from over 37 studios across the world spanning VFX and Animation.
  • Provided the studio with a yearly industry/3rd party software technology analysis
  • Led the effort to secure a nomination for a 2020 Academy Scientific and Technical Award for the DreamWorks hair motion and simulation system, “Wig”
  
• 

  Hair Specialist/Character FX Artist

  DreamWorks Animation

  August 2014 - January 2018

  Glendale

  Currently working as a Hair Specialist on Trolls. This involves taking the character's hair from modeling, to rigging, to styling and simulation.
• 

  Character Technical Director

  DreamWorks Animation

  July 2011 - August 2014

  Greater Los Angeles Area

  Untitled Bollywood Musical
  • Developed a feature for a tool that converted the current hair setups into a new hair system that was
  designed for the next generation proprietary software
  • Implemented a tool that streamlined all the similar hair setups to share the same rig and cut down on the redundancy of copying setups from one character to another
  • Set up majority of the primary character’s hair, clothing and accessories
  
  Kung Fu Panda (to be released in 2016)
  • Worked on body deformations for two fat biped supporting animal characters and focused on
  retaining volume effectively
  • Rigged set up a motion system for the hair and clothing on a main character
  
  Me & My Shadow (shelved in 2013)
  • Was the primary person setting up hair on the entire show
  • Built unique motion systems for complicated setups and the template for supporting characters.
  
  Rocky & Bullwinkle (to be released in 2014)
  • Developed a solution for a unique hair setup for two supporting characters.
• 

  Graduate Research Assistant

  Texas A&M University

  August 2009 - August 2010

  College Station, Texas

  Supported Dr. Ann McNamara in research entitled "Evaluating performance in immersive displays."
• 

  GIS Summer Intern

  ConocoPhillips

  May 2007 - August 2007

  Houston, Texas Area

  Upgrading Geological Software smartSECTION 4.8.01, software that is the cross-section tool of choice for any application where log interpretation speed and accuracy are critical to the success of a subsurface project
• 

  GIS Summer Intern

  ConocoPhillips

  June 2006 - August 2006

  Houston, Texas Area

  • Developed an internal website for the Technical Information Services team to improve
  communications between the merge of Heritage Burlington and ConocoPhillips
  • Implemented using Content Management Server and Sharepoint
• 

  Intern for SETlabs

  Infosys

  May 2005 - July 2005

  Bangalore, KA, India

  Integrated Java Byte Code Instrumentation for a performance monitoring and management
  tool, based on the HP SDK – Application Response Measurement.
  • Tool for performance bottlenecks in an application, in source and byte code
  • Developed the Graphical User Interface for the Central Management Console using Swing as
  well as JSP and Servlets