Curriculum Vitæ

Personal Information

Name: Michael Scarpa
Marital status: married
Nationality: Italian
Gender: Male
Birth date: 24.09.1978
Birth place: Merano, South Tyrol, Italy

Employment and Education

2011 to present FX TD at Double Negative
2011 VFX Professional course at Escape Studios.
The course covered all aspects of VFX production: modelling, texturing, lighting, shading, camera tracking, compositing, effects simulations (particles, rigid bodies, soft bodies, fluids), fur and hair, scripting.
2009 to 2011 Technical Director at Aardman Studios.
Pipeline development, writing little tools and dialogs using Python and PyQt4, and tools development, writing plugins for Maya and Renderman using C++.
Mar. to Oct. 2008 3D Producer part-time education at College of MultiMedia, Amsterdam, on 3D modeling, texturing, lighting and animation (final grade: 90.8)
2007 to 2009 Consultant Visualization at SARA Computing and Networking Services.
Accompanying clients throughout an entire project, implementing the requirements of the client, researching available tools and libraries to efficiently implement the requirements, maintaining visualization facilities like the SARA CAVE, maintaining in-house software packages and libraries.
18-22 Sept. 2006 ASCI Course a17 “Data Visualization and Virtual Reality”, including workshops on VTK, ITK, Virtual Reality, GPU programming as well as Information and Software Visualization
2003 to 2007 Position as PhD Student at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Science, Informatics Institute, Section Computational Science, Scientific Visualization and Virtual Reality Group — quit without promotion.
1997 to 2003 Study of Computer Science, Johannes Kepler University Linz
07.08.1996 Successful passing of the regional exam for the knowledge of the German and Italian language at the highest level (doctorate)
1987 to 1991 Private English lessons

Skills

Software Packages

Advanced Maya (2009, 2010, 2011), Cinema 4D (R10.5, R11),
Intermediate Houdini (9.5, 10, 11), ZBrush, Unity3D (2, 2.5), Lightwave 3D (8.3, 8.5, 9.0)

Programming Languages

Expert Python, C/C++
Advanced Bash, MEL, Vimscript, Java, Javascript, C.O.F.F.E.E.
Intermediate C#, PHP

Programming Libraries And Toolkits

Expert OpenGL, stdlib, Qt 4, PyQt4, PyMEL
Advanced Maya SDK, RenderMan SDK

Operating systems

Expert Mac OS X, Linux/Unix
Advanced Windows

Spoken Languages

Mother tongue German
Native Italian
Expert English, Dutch

Projects

2010 – 2011 Converted in-house developed tools for caching out and loading back Maya fluid simulations, as well as rendering out caches directly in Renderman, to use GTO as file-format.
2010 – 2011 Re-written the display node to show caches in the Maya UI directly, without needing a Maya fluid system, using resizable OpenGL points, with depth sorting and several options like thresholding, step size (showing every so many rows), using cached color or only cached density.
2010 – 2011 Simple Maya tool to import Milo instructions as exported from the Milo after shooting, including a Qt UI.
2010 – 2011 RenderMan plugin for direct loading of Naiad particle caching, including motion blur, radius scaling and randomisation, and random particle culling.
2010 – 2011 Conversion tool for Naiad particle caches to GTO particle caches.
2010 – 2011 Design and implementation of a new in-house software deployment architecture based on SVN, to support multiple versions per project/shot/asset. Also developed various tools to simplify and automate the use of SVN in the context of in-house software development and deployment.
2009 – 2011 Integration of the GTO OpenSource library into the studio pipeline, including patching the code to build on 64bit Linux and filling in all the missing pieces (i.e. compiling all the Maya plugins in the open source code). Also, added support for particle caches in the RiGto library including motion blur. Expanded on deformer features to match requirements of riggers and animators (caching local and global transformation matrices, fixed bug in NURBS deformations and several other minor issues).
2009 – 2011 Writing PyQt dialogs, MEL tools and Maya node plugins to support the in-house pipeline system for advanced referencing in Maya (Maya scene referencing, GTO cache referencing, image referencing, etc.)
2009 – 2011 Design and partial implementation of a plugin-based submission architecture for render farm jobs that can accommodate various applications (Maya, Nuke, RenderMan) as well as various job management systems (Alfred, Tractor).
2009 Development of a simple nurbs extrusion plugin for Maya and RenderMan to simplify modeling and rendering of ropes.
2009 – 2011 Various pipeline tools, including:
  • Referencing tool to import elements in Nuke keeping track of reference in the asset database using a Qt UI.
  • Configurable unix tools for user-permission transfer on files in the in-house asset management system.
  • Maya asset publishing architecture that allows project-specific Python hooks to be executed on publish.
  • Re-write of core database code to use Elixir on top of SQLAlchemy to reflect the database structures.
  • Implementation of a simple (but elegant) RPC module for Python that allowed easier development for in-house specific use of RPC servers and clients.
2008 – 2009 Development of a “serious game” application using Unity3D (2, 2.5) and Cinema 4D (R10.5) to study the consumer behavior regarding food products in relation to various pricing strategies to encourage healthier purchasing (more info)
2008 Developed three plugins for Cinema4D (R10.5 and R11) to add functionality (hide/unhide everything but the selected objects, export selected UV meshes to EPS file, align a row of vertices constrained to one of the three cardinal planes) (more info)
2007 – 2008 Development of a multithreaded CAVE application, including a small crowd simulation, in C++ and Python using CAVELib, OpenSceneGraph, cal3d, CORBA and SDL to perform therapy on patients with phobic disorders in the CAVE virtual environment at SARA Amsterdam (more info)
2006 – 2007 Development of an abstract formalism for the device-independent description and implementation of elementary as well as complex interaction techniques in VR and AR environments
2006 Development of the tech demo “Alize in Otherworld”: game design, world design, character design, art direction, modeling, programming. Game engine: Torque 1.4.0. Content creation: Lightwave 3D 8.3 and 8.5, Modo 201, Photoshop CS3 (more info)
2005 – 2007 “vtkVR” project, extending the VTK toolkit to support VR setups (more info)
2005, 2006 Assisting the master-course “Scientific Visualization”, including giving lectures
2004 – 2005 “Window Into Virtual Reality” project: built a distributed AR setup using optical tracking from A.R.T. GmbH (more info)
2003 Assisting the bachelor-course “Computer Graphics”
2002 – 2003 “A Modular Debugging Approach for Event Graph Analysis” Thesis at the Institute of Technical Computer Science and Telematics, Department for Graphics and Parallel Processing, Johannes Kepler University Linz
2002 Implementation of a version of the game “Duckhunt” for the CAVE virtual reality environment at the Johannes Kepler University Linz
2001 Development of a graphical user interface for the steering of a VR platform with Java3D visualization
2000 Development of a position editor for VRML objects in Java3D
1998 Self-chosen subject for final advanced-programming-course assignment: implementing Tetris (in Java)