CG Artist Interview: Davide Pesare, CG Software Engineer at Pixar Animation Studios. Pag.4
Davide Pesare: Professional in Visual Effects for Movies
CG Explorer: How did you start as a professional in the VFX film industry?
(Davide Pesare): After the difficult choice of declining the offer of one of my former professors to start a PhD with him, I decided to emigrate and start my first real job. It was in Madrid again. My employer, Pyro Studios, had produced a few successful videogames (such as the Commandos series) and were looking into making their own engine for the next-gen consoles (now available as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), and that is what I did. It was fun and I learned a lot, until I saw that in Australia, Animal Logic were looking for shader writers. Also thanks to a good dose of luck, I got hired without a having years of experience. My new boss, in fact, had worked on the Natural:Shaders after I left Rebelthink, and knew exactly my level and how I wrote code even before interviewing me. I turned out to be up to the task, starting by writing shaders, then writing the company shading and lighting system as well as several useful 2d and 3d tools, then teaching new starters Renderman and our proprietary tools and finally even shot lighting and compositing. Eventually I got credited as a Senior Lighter for the Oscar-winning feature movie Happy Feet. Since then, my task has been always to be a bridge between artist and software engineers, and as such I helped on the movie 300 too.
Next page: Happy Feet Senior Lighter and Shader Writer
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