Robert Powell

Work History

• 

  Senior Pipeline TD

  Soul Machines

  July 2019 - July 2020

  San Francisco, CA

• Software Engineer

  Digital Anarchy

  November 2015 - August 2018
• 

  Senior Pipeline Technical Director

  Laika

  March 2013 - November 2015

  Hillsboro, OR

  • Fabric Engine integration and testing
  • Porting custom UIs to use Fabric Engine to add mulitproc and gpu capabilities
  • Writing and Optimizing Maya C++ plugins:
  • Closest point on surface
  • Vertex rivet code to connect transforms to polygon mesh vertices
  • Optimized shrinkWrap plugin
  • Various Maya Animation Tools written in PyQt:
  • Adding multiple selection, copy, paste and drag and drop to
  custom table widget ui
  • Creation of Bookmark bar ui in pyqt for custom table widget uis
  Maintenance of existing production code in python & PyQt for Rapid Prototyping Dept
  • Adding custom palettes in PyQt to Mari paint interface to support
  pantone color maps
  • Added ability to import and manage sound clips
  • Added ability to import/export animation curves from an external file,
  including offsets
  • Updates to various modeling and publishing tools
  • Creation of ambient occlusion masks from selected polygon sets
  • Creation of snapshot tools for modelers for character development
• 

  Senior Lighting Technical Director

  Rhythm & Hues Studios

  April 2007 - February 2013

  Worked on over 9 films for both lighting and FX and also wrote artist tools and user interfaces in python, Houdini's HOM toolbox, PyQT and R&H proprietary software. Films included:
  - RIPD (crowd simulation and lighting for soul tunnel sequence)
  - Life of Pi (wrote artist tools in Houdini's HOM toolbox and python)
  - Hop (lookdev on subsurface mtls and some shader support, also lighting for hanger sequence)
  - Marmaduke (lighting and particle simulations in Houdini)
  - Land of the Lost (used proprietary software to create environments for over 30 s

  
• 

  Cloth and Hair TD, Spiderman 3

  Sony Pictures Imageworks

  October 2005 - April 2007

  - Setup Peter Parker costume for PG sequence, including modeling fixes and simulation of garment, creation of pipeline in MEL to generate costume from initial meshes and wrote several tools to facilitate SP3 cloth pipeline in Syflex and MEL.
  - Goo TD, worked as a member of the 'goo' team for the Venom character creating membranes, spans, and running simulations, as well as writing simulation and cacheing tools in MEL
• 

  FX Department Lead

  Laika

  September 2004 - September 2005

  - managed team of 5 people for all Moongirl FX, overseeing cloth, particle, hair and fluid sims.
  - developed cloth pipeline in Syflex and Maya for Leon character, then trained other team members in it's use. Created the scripts for batching and simulating the character on the queue in MEL.
  - developed hair and fur pipelines in Maya and maya plug-in 'Shave and a Haircut'. Created initial hair sim for Leon character and extensions for rendering Shave in Renderman.
  - simmed fur on the Earl and Siegfried creatures.
• 

  Technical Director

  Industrial Light & Magic

  October 1998 - July 2004

  Worked on over 9 films doing lighting and FX for Harry Potter 3, Van Helsing, Pirates of the Caribean, K19 the Widowmaker, Episode 2, The Mummy Returns, Minority Report, The Green Mile and The Mummy.
  - Harry Potter 3: cloth sims for 3 shots on dementor characters and Harry Potter
  - Van Helsing: ported over proprietary hair software to new Zeno platform
  - Pirates of the Carribean: generated cloth sims and rigid body sims for 9 shots
  - K19: animation of deforming geometry on sub and lighting
  - The Mummy Returns: Td'ed shots including particle sims, lighti

  

  

  
• 

  Software Engineer

  Rhythm & Hues Studios

  December 1994 - August 1998

  - rendering team lead and production support, coordinating efforts of 3-5 people for ongoing design development and support on in house renderer, wren.
  - rendering team member, supporting users on how to use wren, and production support for 2 theme park rides as well as films Speed 2, Kazaam and Ace Ventura Pet Detective
  - worked in Motif and C++ for front end script generator for renderer, wrenui
  - worked on in house tools for particle simulation and object instancing
  - all work in C++ for 3.5 years

  

  

• Software Engineer and Pandemonium project lead

  Xaos Tools

  October 1991 - June 1994

  - Lead Programmer for Pandemonium software on Silicon Graphics
  - completely responsible for technical management of Pandemonium, a high level image
  processing animation package with over 300 users
  - managed team of programmers of 4-6 people from initial specification to shipping of product
  - designed and implemented port of Newproc image processing software to C+++
  - Software engineer, Paint Alchemy Photoshop plug-in
  - Software engineer, Oots++ proprietary software
  All work done in C++ on Silicon Graphics or Macintosh platforms

• Software Engineer

  Island Graphics

  August 1988 - October 1991

  Island Graphics was an OEM software manufacturer for SUN OS systems. They created Sun Write, Sun Paint and Sun Draw.
  - worked in C++ on SUN linux systems to support in house text library for word processing
  - worked in C++ on SUN for Sun Draw object library
  - worked in C++ on Mac OS for proprietary desktop publishing software for Hallmark Corporation