Steven Demers


EDUCATION:

M.S. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA - May, 1997
Major: Electrical Engineering Minor: Cinema GPA: 4.0
B.S. Cornell University, College of Engineering, Ithaca, NY - May, 1996
Major: Electrical Engineering Minor: Computer Science GPA: 3.7

WORK EXPERIENCE:

Look Director (Matrix Revolutions)   July 2002 – July 2003
Tippett Studios  (Berkeley, CA)
•        R&D biomechanical look involving shading/texture development
•        Supervised look development and lighting of various sequences (technical and artistically)
•        Worked to extend existing TD pipeline to handle a show with large CG environments

Look Supervisor (Lord of the Rings Trilogy) May 2000 – June 2002
Weta Digital (Wellington, NZ)
        Worked with Art Dept in designing and supervising the shading/texturing/lighting for LOTR
        Researched and implemented techniques for producing realistic 'soft tissue' effects for Gollum, etc.
        Implemented a subdivision surface creature pipeline including coding various aspects of it

Department Head: C&L/Production R&D March 1999 - May 2000
Manex Visual Effects (Alameda, CA)
        Developed techniques to skin a CG character to derive complex effects like skin stretching across muscle and bone,
wrinkles, etc.
        Authored shading/lighting library including support for backscattering and translucent flesh behaviors
        Provided technical support to all productions in house

Lead Shader Writer/C&L TD May 1997 - March 1999
Manex Visual Effects (Alameda, CA)
        Co-developed complete shading/lighting environement for use on "The Matrix" including shading models for realistic
flesh as well as boolean shaders for both RenderMan and Mental-Ray
        Developed the 3D pipeline for getting very large and complex scenes to render properly
        Developed a hybrid 2D/3D system to render many similar objects in a fraction of the time to render the actual 3D
geometry
        Developed a particle system to simulate viscous fluid flow
        Designed volumetric atmospheric effects using RenderMan
        Implemented a virtual set system in RenderMan
        Wrote various scripts and C++ code to support production including image processing software, procedural modelling
tools, etc.


RESEARCH/LAB EXPERIENCE:
        Implemented various optical special effects on a soundstage
        Worked on a vision-based head tracker for augmented reality applications
        Developed an edge detector based on the human visual system that outperforms edge detectors currently in use
        Performed a psychological study on the effectiveness of ocular depth cues in creating a 3D virtual environment from a
2D image
        Built a 32-bit computer with EEPROM chips


RELEVANT SKILLS: Background in computer graphics, psychology (human perception), digital image processing,
computer architecture (pipe-lined and parallel systems), optics and optical electronics, micro-processor design. Have done
some stage lighting/optical effects work.