Moderator: George ElKoura, Pixar Animation Studios, United States of America
George ElKoura is a Lead Engineer at Pixar Animation Studios. He has many years of animation industry experience, first as an Engineer at Side Effects Software, working on Houdini, and later joining Pixar where he has been for the past 12 years. At Pixar, his current responsibilities include leading a team of engineers deliver high-performance proprietary animation software to artists as well as open source software like USD, Hydra and OpenSubdiv to the industry.

Lecturer(s): Florian Zitzelsberger, Pixar Animation Studios, United States of America
Florian is a software engineer at Pixar Animation Studios where he works on the proprietary animation tool Presto. Specifically, Florian contributes to the Presto Execution System, a high-performance computation engine used for real-time, full-fidelity character rig evaluation. Florian joined Pixar in 2011, and has worked in the games industry prior to that.

George ElKoura, Pixar Animation Studios, United States of America
George ElKoura is a Lead Engineer at Pixar Animation Studios. He has many years of animation industry experience, first as an Engineer at Side Effects Software, working on Houdini, and later joining Pixar where he has been for the past 12 years. At Pixar, his current responsibilities include leading a team of engineers deliver high-performance proprietary animation software to artists as well as open source software like USD, Hydra and OpenSubdiv to the industry.

Description: In this course we aim to talk the audience members through the practical techniques of applying multithreading to achieve interactivity and high performance for professional grade animation tools. We will discuss the philosophy behind the design of Presto, Pixar's proprietary animation tool and how its design lends itself to take advantage of the increasing number of cores found in today's desktops and servers. We will also walk users through the advantages multithreading plays in our popular open source technologies: USD, Hydra and OpenSubdiv especially as they relate to the artist experience using our interactive tools.