Physical Simulation Software Engineer | Tool Developer | VFX | Digital Features | Games
A graph-based C++ procedural execution framework for real-time deformation and simulation workflows, and a real-time proximity deformer built on top of it.
Large-scale distributed multiphase fluid simulation for the river and cauldron sequences.
Layered FEM flesh and skin simulation on the bears and horses of Brave. Independent volumetric flesh and sliding triangular skin simulations, both biphasic, with constitutive models that adapt stiffness to hold across slow secondary motion and fast ballistic action.
Architected and led PAL, a C++/Python simulation scene graph used across most Pixar films from Toy Story 3 through Incredibles 2.
Tetrahedral FEM flesh simulation for WALL·E's devolved humans, from jelly-blob concept through final production. Ran on every shot with a human character, operated by animators. Co-authored the SIGGRAPH 2008 sketch.
Rebuilt ILM's flesh and cloth simulation pipeline, then advanced it production by production — culminating in Davy Jones, widely considered one of the greatest CG creatures ever put on screen.
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.
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.
The Varactyl — the four-ton lizard creature ridden by Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars Episode III — required realistic soft-tissue dynamics at ILM production scale. We used performance-driven finite element simulation to bring secondary motion to the creature.
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.