Tom Sanocki

Tom Sanocki

Engineering Director, Avatars at Roblox

Engineering Director, Avatars / 23 yrs

Menlo Park, CA

Executive Producer / Producer

Gary the Gull (2016)

Tech Art Lead / Characters & Cinematics

Destiny (2014)

Character Model Speed

Monsters University (2013)

Simulation Software Engineer / Test Pilot

Brave (2012)

Character Modeling and Articulation Lead

Up (2009)

Character Lead

Ratatouille (2007)

Character Lead

Cars (2006)

Character Technical Director

Finding Nemo (2003)

Engineering Director for Avatars at Roblox. Previously led several engineering teams at Facebook AR/VR and TripActions, led character teams at Pixar and Bungie, and was founder & CEO of Limitless Ltd, a platform for interactive VR characters (acquired by Lytro).

VES award for Outstanding Animated Character for Mater on the film Cars; 5 graphics patents; several presentations at SIGGRAPH, GDC, and FMX. Graduated with a BSE in Computer Science Engineering from Princeton University.
Work History

  • Engineering Director, Avatars

    ROBLOX

    December 2020 - Present
    San Mateo, California, United States

    Engineering Director for Avatars

  • Director of Engineering

    TripActions

    November 2019 - December 2020
    Palo Alto, CA

    Built new Enterprise engineering group, including building product strategy; process & culture including revamping incident management, creating engineering competency matrix, improving engineering security/privacy, and running security/architecture reviews

  • Senior Engineering Manager, AR/VR

    Facebook

    May 2018 - November 2019
    Menlo Park, CA

    Led 4 product / platform teams building social VR apps (such as Facebook Horizon) and Oculus social platform.

  • Engineering Manager, Interactivity

    Lytro

    January 2018 - April 2018

    Interactive lightfields running in game engines; remastered lightfields to run on mobile VR hardware. Lytro was acquired in Mar 2018.

  • Engineering Manager, Realtime & Interactivity

    Lytro

    December 2017 - April 2018
    San Francisco Bay Area

    Post acquisition, running Lytro's interactivity & realtime engineering team bringing light fields into game engines. Remastered VR lightfield video to run on standalone mobile VR headsets. Reported to SVP/Head of Engineering.

  • CEO / Co-founder

    Limitless Entertainment

    April 2015 - December 2017
    Seattle, WA

    Platform for interactive VR characters & in-VR content creation tools.

  • Character/Cinematics Technical Art Lead

    Bungie

    August 2011 - April 2015
    Bellevue, WA

    Managed all character/cinematic teams that fell between departments or needed additional technical/art expertise, spinning up new teams as necessary.
    Cloth and Hair Lead
    Face Rigging Lead
    Social Space Lead (i.e. the Tower), including creative and animation direction
    Cinematic Tech Art Lead for in-game realtime cinematics, including collaboration on creative direction for Spaceflight loading cinematics

  • Character Lead

    Pixar

    June 2000 - August 2011
    Emeryville, CA

    - Character Lead on Cars, Ratatouille; uncredited Technical Character Lead on Finding Nemo.
    - Led the character modeling and articulation teams on Up.
    - Inventor on 4 patents; several SIGGRAPH presentations.
    - VES Award winner for Outstanding Animated Character (Mater on Cars)
    - Designed and built character master rigs, including Pixar’s first face rig.
    - Technical pipeline design and implementation, including UIs and workflows.
    - Co-designed and built next-gen simulation pipeline for hair and cloth, and added Naiad fluid simulation support as a side project.
    - Collaborated with Pixar R&D on hair simulation and fast creature simulation.
    - Prototyped animation-friendly directable cloth/hair system with fast cloth preview.
    - Top bug fixer in 100+ person Studio Tools team across two release cycles.
    - Pioneered first Pixar studio-wide shared HumanRig, drastically reducing technical delays and improving artistic reach.
    - Introduced “modeling to pose” techniques to allow art to see character modeling in context, significantly reducing approval times and improving art director confidence in the design.
    - Background character hair R&D in Finding Nemo.
    - Master rigged, modeled, and rigged Kevin the bird in Up.
    - Rigged Larousse, prepro version of Git, and Linguini’s hair in Ratatouille.
    - Rigged Mater, Mia/Tia, Chick Hicks, and Bessie in Cars.
    - Procedurally modeled, rigged, and shaded McQueen’s barbed wire in Cars.
    - Procedurally modeled, rigged, and set up simulation for the Jellyfish in Finding Nemo.
    - Rigged background human in Finding Nemo.

  • Character Lead

    Pixar

    June 2000 - August 2011
    Emeryville, CA

    Character Technical Lead on Cars, Ratatouille
    Character Modeling & Rigging Lead on Up
    Co-designed and co-built Brave simulation software and pipeline

  • Member Of Technical Staff

    DIVA

    June 1998 - June 2000

    Software development for video on demand systems in C++ on embedded hardware, including 1000 processor video streaming servers utilizing custom-built SIMD processors using a custom SIMD C variant.

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Education

  • Computer Science Engineering

    Princeton University

    September 1994 - June 1998