Walt Disney Animation Studios is seeking a Software Engineer to develop and implement new algorithms for their Production Technology Hair and Cloth team, focusing on creating, supporting, and evolving custom toolsets for procedural creation of hairstyles, fur grooms, embroidery, feathers, and character effects shot work including hair and cloth simulation.
Requirements
- Understanding of computer graphics foundational concepts and algorithms
- Proficiency in C++, ideally C++17 or later
- Ability to develop and optimize algorithms for efficiency and scalability
- Familiarity working with Maya API, USD, OpenGL, and/or Houdini
- Strong mathematical fundamentals, such as linear algebra, PDEs, and numerical methods
- Experience with performance tuning and writing/debugging of parallel and vectorized code
- Familiarity with GPU programming
Responsibilities
- Creation, support, and evolution of the studio’s custom tool set used for procedural creation of hairstyles, fur grooms, embroidery, and feathers, as well as tools for character effects shot work including hair and cloth simulation.
- Evolution and support of our procedural geometry tools for creating hair styles, fur grooms, embroidery, feathers, and fiber-based cloth.
- Development of our extensive set of custom geometry deformers.
- Design and development of intuitive visualizations and new interactive tools and workflows.
- Development of mathematical and geometric libraries underlying our overall tool set, e.g. collision detection/resolution, linear algebra, and simulation and optimization libraries.
- Support and extension of our cloth and hair simulation solvers and associated authoring tools, e.g. for property authoring, specification of constraints, collision interactions, etc.
- Profiling and optimization of our tools and libraries, both existing and those in design/development.
Other
- 3+ years experience in a professional animation/VFX, or games environment and/or comparable academic/research experience with a focus on areas related to our hair and cloth toolset
- Ability to engage with artists to understand their requirements and formulate practical solutions
- Excellent problem solving, troubleshooting, and debugging skills
- Ability to adapt and extend relevant research to production-level tools tailored to specific art-directed needs
- Production experience working with artists to design and implement tools
