I build tools for people who make things.
I’m a software engineer who cares deeply about craft — in software and everywhere else. I’ve spent much of my career building simulation systems, graphics pipelines, and tools for artists — places where engineering and creativity come together to do really cool things. I’m happiest working on complex systems that people actually enjoy using. Outside of work I’m a dad, a woodworker, a photographer, and a musician. Making things — with code or with my hands — is how I understand the world.
Architected and led PAL, a C++/Python simulation scene graph used across most Pixar films from Toy Story 3 through Incredibles 2.
Led skin and muscle simulation developments on Incredibles 2.
Led development of flesh, skin, and fluid simulators built on PAL.
Skin sliding over a character can become non-physically snagged in curved or creased regions — armpits, for example — when it becomes ambiguous which part of the kinematic surface the skin should track. We address this by performing 2D ray-tracing over the mesh surface to resolve the ambiguity robustly and efficiently.
Hank, the grumpy septapus from Finding Dory, required flesh and skin simulation across a complex animated rig plus suckers and a mantle with very different simulation needs. We built a new modular meshing pipeline — with independent operators for refinement, culling, and conforming — and used separate tetrahedral meshes for body, suckers, and mantle.
The Brave river was Pixar's largest simulation project to date — 35 shots built from an 81-million-voxel base simulation running across 65 machines via OpenMPI. Per-shot windowed simulations at 160M voxels handled character interaction, driving secondary FLIP, ripple, particle, and volume sims for waterfalls, foam, and debris, with artistically tuned shading using advected Tessendorf displacement.
Brave required ballistic flesh and skin motion that tracks exaggerated art-directed animation — goals typically at odds. We simulate volumetric flesh and sliding skin independently using biphasic constitutive models that adapt simulation parameters for stability under large forces and fast accelerations, with a hybrid semi-implicit / fully-implicit time integration scheme.
The soft, obese humans aboard the Axiom needed automatic secondary ballistic motion that looks realistic even when the primary animation is exaggerated and stylized. We used tetrahedral FEM with two complementary control mechanisms — soft constraints pulling simulated points toward animation targets and adaptive rest-state retargeting — to balance physical plausibility against art direction.
Mr. Hyde in Van Helsing required a fully digital creature that could hold up against a live-action performance. We retargeted motion capture from a 6'3" performer onto the 9' tall Hyde in real time using forward and inverse kinematic controls, and ran tetrahedral flesh simulations — using a crystalline meshing technique — to add secondary soft-tissue dynamics.