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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

Employment (5)

Duality Robotics: San Mateo, CA, US

2023-03-29 to present | Technical Lead (Product)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Patrick Witting

Pixar Animation Studios: Emeryville, CA, US

2020-09-01 to 2023-03-18 | Lead Technical Director (Effects)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Patrick Witting

Sony Pictures Imageworks: Culver City, CA, US

2005-01-01 to 2019-07-01 | Effects Supervisor (Effects)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Patrick Witting

Walt Disney Feature Animation: Burbank, CA, US

2001-01-01 to 2005-01-01 | Technical Director (Effects)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Patrick Witting

DreamWorks Animation LLC: Glendale, CA, US

1995-03-01 to 1999-03-01 | Technical Director (Effects)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Patrick Witting

Education and qualifications (1)

Stanford University: Stanford, CA, US

1989-09-01 to 1995-04-01 | Ph.D. degree (Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics)
Education
Source: Self-asserted source
Patrick Witting

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