Christian Laforte
claforte@feelingsoftware.com

I am a software consultant specialized in 3D graphics, with excellent analytical skills and a solid track record in designing and implementing complex software.

Fluent in English and French.
Ability to read, write and speak Japanese to an intermediate level (1000 kanji).

Feeling Software Inc., Montreal, QC, Canada

March 2005 – Now (President and owner)

Feeling Software provides 3D graphics consulting and software development services to a variety of clients. As the President, my responsibilities include:

• Recruitring and mentoring employees that are smart and that can be trusted to get the right things done on time.
• Marketing and managing the relationship with all of our demanding clients.
• Consulting with our clients, to share my 3D graphics expertise.
• Researching and developing some of the projects, e.g. ColladaMaya physics export, integration of Ageia’s physics engine in Maya, implementing an OpenGL wrapper and a Maya plug-in for DeepLight.
• Long term planification and strategy.

Dakis, Montreal, QC, Canada

November 2003 – March 2005 (Director of Research and Development)

Dakis is a Montreal start-up developing technologies for the retail market. Their flagship product, the Dakis Humanized Expert (DHE), is an automated sales assistant that helps consumers identify the products that best fit their specific needs.

My mandate was to lead the technology team in developing a market-ready DHE, and to enhance the DHE through additional technology such as 3D actors, computer vision and voice recognition.

I lead the technology team (7 developers) and reported directly to the CEO. I also represented the Dakis technology with external parties: investors, customers, partners, media, and government. Other non-technical tasks included hiring, documenting our activities for government subsidies, etc.

I had broad technical responsibilities:

• 3D Actor custom engine developed using C# and Managed DirectX, including realtime lip sync and speech streaming of server-side Text-to-speech. I also implemented the necessary import/export code, to/from the engine, Maya, Poser, Collada and custom tools.
• Performed research on computer vision (face tracking) applied to the retail market.
• Implemented the first PocketPC implementation of Dakis Humanized Expert, using C# and the Compact Framework and supporting wireless roaming and barcode scanning. Gave public presentations with Microsoft Canada.
• Lead various smaller projects and assisted the team with designing and building core Dakis technology.
• Technologies involved included Flash/ActionScript2.0, web services, CMS.

Alias, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

February 2001 – October 2003 (Software Engineer, Maya rendering team)

I designed and implemented critical parts of the HWRender rendering component, which was introduced in Maya5.0. This new renderer takes advantage of consumer graphics hardware to produce images that can match software rendering quality, yet render up to two orders of magnitude faster.

• I took the lead for the overall project; designed the graphics engine, API and internal data structures.
• I designed and wrote the majority of the code, and in particular took responsibility for the shading quality aspect of the project and implemented shading support for five different classes of hardware, ranging from single-textured per-vertex lighting, to per-pixel shading (including bump, reflection and refraction mapping), shadows, motion blur, particles, projective textures and depth of field.
• I developed a programmable shading architecture, including a language adapted to Maya's shading networks, a translator/compiler that outputs multiple passes of Cg and GLSL vertex and fragment programs. 

I was the main technical contact with HW vendors (nVidia, ATI, 3Dlabs), and the in-house OpenGL and hardware rendering expert. Prior assignments included:

• Improved and wrote samples for Maya APIs such as HW Shader plug-ins.
• Implemented the shading and texturing portions of a Maya to Shockwave3D incremental translator.

ATI Research, Marlborough, MA, USA

January 2000 - January 2001 (OpenGL Driver Engineer, MS Windows)

As a member of the driver team supporting the Rage128, Rage Fury MAXX and Radeon graphics cards, I achieved a deep understanding of the OpenGL API, of the driver and its interaction with games, applications and hardware.

• Analyzed, debugged, and corrected problems in the driver (C, 80x86 assembly, SSE, 3DNOW).
• Analyzed and profiled key applications (Quake 3 and Unreal engines, Maya, 3DSMAX, XSI) and popular benchmarks. Optimized the driver for performance.
• Implemented and maintained OpenGL extensions.

Other tasks included diagnosing and finding workarounds for hardware failures, meeting with critical customers, and participating in the specification of future products.

Sanyo Electric, Osaka, Japan

June - December 1998 (7 months full time internship)
December 1998 - April 1999 (external consultant from Canada)
May - September 1999 (4 months full time internship)

This internship allowed me to discover and appreciate the Japanese culture and language. As the sole foreigner of Sanyo’s Japanese artificial vision research lab, my contributions include:

• Designed and programmed a large number of UI components in Panorama Boutique, a picture post-processing software for Windows and Mac, used by digital photographers and bundled with Epson printers and electronic microscopes.
• Helped other researchers to update their software engineering skills: source control, object-oriented design, code portability, internationalization issues.

Expertise

Graphics Hardware

• Expert in all aspects of the OpenGL API, including all shading extensions
• Direct3D, especially through the Managed interface.
• Understanding of PC hardware architectures.
• Complete familiarity with all parts of a modern graphics engine.

3D graphics and mathematics

• Experienced with Maya Plug-in API, MEL and content creation.
• Advanced mathematics and physics applied to computer graphics and games.
• Familiar with the latest research from Siggraph.
• Illumination models (both local and global), shadow techniques, transparency, image-based lighting.
• Procedural shading techniques and languages (OpenGL Shading Language, Cg/HLSL, Renderman).
• Visibility determination: raytracing, rasterization, occlusion culling, acceleration structures.
• Geometry representations: polygon meshes, subdivision schemes, NURBS.
• Particles systems, image-based and volume rendering.
• Geometric and shading LOD (level-of-detail) techniques.
• Post-processes and compositing.
• Games content creation process. Algorithms and techniques commonly used in game programming.

Software engineering

• 10 years of experience in C/C++ development.
• 2 years of experience with C# and .NET.
• Extensive experience with CPU and GPU assembly: Intel 80x86, SSE, Motorola 68k, vertex/pixel shaders.
• Software architecture and design best practices. OOD, OOP and patterns. Algorithms and complexity theory.
• Cross-platform development (Windows, Linux, IRIX, MacOS X). Intimate knowledge of Windows APIs.
• Accomplished debugger (from printf to remote kernel-level debugging).
• Project management and scheduling.
• Source control. Automated build, documentation and testing tools.

Others

• Experienced with Matlab and image processing.
• Intel Integrated Primitives and VTune.
• Knowledge of computer vision, especially feature tracking and recent extensions (e.g. AAM)

Education

1995 - 1999 École Polytechnique, Université de Montréal, Canada
Computer Engineering Degree