Christian Laforte

Current

President at Feeling Software

Past

Director of R&D at Dakis Decision Systems
Software Developer at Autodesk (formerly Alias)
OpenGL driver engineer at AMD (formerly ATI Research)

Software developer at Sanyo Electric

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Education

Université de Montréal - Ecole polytechnique de Montréal
Ecole Secondaire Vaudreuil

Recommended

7 people have recommended Christian

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

Christian Laforte’s Summary

President and 3D software architect.

Passionate about 3D graphics and computer vision technologies. Interested in joint R&D efforts and partnerships, as well as finding new applications for our technology.

Christian Laforte’s Specialties:

Applied research and development, especially for interactive 3D Graphics, computer vision and game tools.

Christian Laforte’s Experience

President

Feeling Software

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

March 2005 — Present (4 years 5 months)

President and founder of a consulting firm specialized in 3D Graphics R&D and high performance software development.
- Computer vision algorithms
- Real-time rendering with OpenGL and Direct3D
- Extending game engines, e.g. Unreal Engine 3, Emergent, Virtools
- Plug-ins for Maya, 3DSMax, Photoshop
- Collada and other 3D file formats

Clients include: Sony Computer Entertainment of America, Epic Games, Google, Adobe, Khronos Group, Scaleform, DeepLight, and many others. Our software is used in dozens of game studios by over 13,000 artists and developers.

"We've been thrilled to work with the engineers at Feeling Software. They quickly get to the heart of our requirements because they understand our problem domain so well. When they start coding, they hit the ground running, and deliver great software -- on time -- with minimal management required from us."

Michael V. Capps, Ph.D.
President, Epic Games Inc.

For more information, check out: http://www.feelingsoftware.com
Director of R&D

Dakis Decision Systems

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

October 2003 — February 2005 (1 year 5 months)

Provide guidance and leadership to a diverse and talented group of developers.
Explore new ideas to sustain and grow our technological edge. These ideas and algorithms range from our core business in artificial intelligence, to innovative interfaces using 3D graphics and computer vision.
Meet with investors, customers and partners.
Software Developer

Autodesk (formerly Alias)

(Public Company; 201-500 employees; Computer Software industry)

February 2001 — October 2003 (2 years 9 months)

Within the Maya rendering team, I designed and implemented many critical parts (programmable shading, lighting) of the HWRender rendering component, which was introduced in Maya5.0. This new renderer takes advantage of consumer graphics hardware to produce images that approaches software rendering quality, yet renders up to two orders of magnitude faster.

I was the main technical contact with HW vendors (nVidia, ATI, 3Dlabs), and the in-house OpenGL and hardware rendering expert.

Prior assignments included:
• Improved and wrote samples for Maya APIs such as HW Shader plug-ins.
• Implemented the shading and texturing portions of a Maya to Shockwave3D incremental translator.
OpenGL driver engineer

AMD (formerly ATI Research)

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Computer Hardware industry)

January 2000 — January 2001 (1 year 1 month)

As a member of the driver team supporting the Rage128, Rage Fury MAXX and Radeon graphics cards, I achieved a deep understanding of the OpenGL API, of the driver and its interaction with games, applications and hardware.
• Analyzed, debugged, and corrected problems in the driver.
• Analyzed and profiled key applications (Maya, 3DSMAX, XSI, Quake 3 and Unreal engines) and popular benchmarks. Optimized the driver for workstation stability and performance.
• Implemented and maintained OpenGL extensions.
Other tasks included diagnosing and finding workarounds for hardware failures, meeting with critical customers, and participating in the specification of future products.
Software developer

Sanyo Electric

(Public Company; Computer Software industry)

1999 — 2000 (1 year)

As an intern in the computer vision lab of Sanyo Electric near Osaka, Japan, I developed key features of the Panorama Boutique software for Windows, and single-handedly ported the whole application to MacOS 7.

This experience also gave me the opportunity to learn and better appreciate the Japanese culture and language.