Personal information

Biography

Towards the finish of my Ph.D. work at Stanford, writing a fluid solver to study cloud top instabilities, I saw a talk on how ILM brought dinosaurs to the big screen in Jurassic Park. I found my calling, and moved to LA, where DreamWorks was starting an animation studio.

On my first movie, Prince of Egypt, I used a fluid solver that I wrote to create smoke simulations, discussed in a SIGGRAPH paper. Fluid sim work has been a constant thread in my work, at DreamWorks, Disney, Sony, Method, and most recently Pixar. I've had many roles, working on 26 feature length movies, as a programmer, an effects artist, an effects lead, and an effects supervisor.

After developing the fire pipeline at Sony for the movie Ghost Rider, I specialized in fire simulations and explosions. The culmination of my VFX and animation career was Pixar's movie Elemental, where I helped develop the fire character simulation rig, which all fire characters used.

I've recently started an AI adventure at Duality Robotics.

Activities

Works (2)

Creating Elemental Characters: From Sparks to Fire

2023-08-06 | Conference paper
Contributors: Jonathan Hoffman; Te Hu; Paul Kanyuk; Stephen Marshall; George Nguyen; Hope Schroers; Patrick Witting
Source: check_circle
Crossref

Computational fluid dynamics in a traditional animation environment

Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH '99
1999 | Journal article
Contributors: Patrick Witting
Source: Self-asserted source
Patrick Witting