My name is Dan Englesson and I’m working as Lead USD Pipeline Technical Director at Goodbye Kansas Studios. For the past 6 years I have been leading the development of a new VFX pipeline completely based on Pixar’s open-sourced OpenUSD framework, enabling us to efficiently take on large-scale cinematics and VFX projects.
Prior to moving back to Sweden I worked at Pixar Animation Studios in San Francisco for 5 years, where I worked on the movies Coco, Finding Dory and The Good Dinosaur as a Lightspeed and Pipeline Technical Director developing and maintaining the pipeline in the Pipeline team as well as optimizing renders in the Lightspeed team. Furthermore I worked in the RnD department optimizing light sampling for Pixar’s inhouse sampler that became a part of Renderman later on.
Before joining Pixar I worked as a Core Engineer at The Moving Picture Company in London creating new tools for blockbuster movies such as World War Z and The Jungle Book.
I received a Master of Science degree in Media Technology and Engineering in 2012. An education that gave me a strong knowledge in math, physics and programming techniques needed for creating state of the art visual effects for movies and games, which has enabled me to work with some of the best in the industry.