Ivan Neulander

Current

• Principal Software Engineer at Rhythm & Hues

Past

• Intern at William M. Mercer

Education

• University of Toronto
• University of Toronto

Connections

204 connections

Industry

Motion Pictures and Film

Websites

• Publications and Presentations
• My Home Page @ R&H
• My Home Page @ UofT (old)

Ivan Neulander’s Summary

I am a Software Engineer with expertise in the field of Computer Graphics, with over 10 years of experience in the Visual Effects industry. I currently lead a team of 4 Software Engineers who are responsible for our proprietary production rendering software.

I have designed and now oversee the development of many specialized code modules that support rendering-related features in the studio, most notably:

* photorealistic hair rendering, with numerous tricks to speed up rendering without sacrificing image quality

* high-quality procedural displacement mapping with quick, multithreaded displaced normal map generation (app/library called "amok")

* a multithreaded 2D motion blur solution which, thanks to a set of effective heuristics, rivals our 3D motion blur in quality at 10-50 times the speed, for the majority of rendering at R&H (app/library called "pixmotor")

* a versatile texture reprojection tool, which can accurately construct textures from tracked geometry and live footage, as well as transferring textures between models of different topologies (app/library called "primitex").

* a technique for efficiently rendering soft shadows from area lights, using parallax-based interpolation over multiple depth maps (called "pismo")

Many of the above are covered in my presentations and publications. The following page contains links to some of my publications, slides, and recorded presentations at SIGGRAPH:

http://www.rhythm.com/~ivan/pubs.html

Ivan Neulander’s Specialties:

I have lots of experience with rendering and 2D algorithms, including:
* hair rendering
* subsurface scattering
* image-based lighting
* soft shadowing
* displacement mapping
* scan conversion
* ray tracing
* spatial and temporal sampling and filtering

My programming language of choice is C++ and I prefer Perl for scripting. I have experience with prman and mantra shader writing.

Ivan Neulander’s Experience

• Principal Software Engineer

  Rhythm & Hues

  (Privately Held; 501-1000 employees; Motion Pictures and Film industry)

  January 1998 — Present (11 years 7 months)

  I lead a team of software engineers primarily responsible for R&H's proprietary rendering software.

• Intern

  William M. Mercer

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; MMC; Information Services industry)

  January 1995 — December 1997 (3 years)

  I mostly did database programming to compute and analyze various employee benefit statistics.

Ivan Neulander’s Education

• University of Toronto

  M.Sc. , Computer Graphics , 1995 — 1997

• University of Toronto

  B.Sc. , Computer Science , 1991 — 1995

Additional Information

Ivan Neulander’s Websites:

• Publications and Presentations
• My Home Page @ R&H
• My Home Page @ UofT (old)

Ivan Neulander’s Interests:

Computer graphics, rendering, software engineering

Ivan Neulander’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch