Christian Barrett

Resume

4 min read

Experience

Oracle

Principal Software Engineer November 2024 - Present

  • Proposed, defined, and pitched technical & strategic direction for Creative Labs, a series of projects bringing AI to the film industry by enhancing existing creative toolsets, focusing on integration with existing workflows over creating final pixel.
  • Led architecture and design for the Reference Pipeline, an animation pipeline implementation demonstrating how to setup a studio on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Meta

Senior Tools Programmer - Games *October 2023 - September 2024 (studio closure)

  • Developed tools primarily for the cinematic and animation workflows, including a narrative trigger system and automatic animation republishing on rig changes, saving many artist hours
  • Built tooling for the blueprints editor, authoring a Blueprint Template system, allowing artists to more easily reuse parts of blueprints that BP function libraries & macros don’t cover. Also wrote custom K2 nodes in C++ to simplify user interaction with blueprints, and created python bindings for working with Blueprints from script

Spire Animation

Engineering Manager January 2023 - August 2023 (studio closure)

  • Doubled the team size in order to prepare for production, setting up interview process, standardizing questions and approach, and formalizing candidate review process.
  • Coached and guided employees to take measurable steps to progress their careers
  • Alongside the CTO and VP of Infra, drove technology strategy and aligned it with production goals
  • Formalized team processes, reducing time to issue resolution by 30%
  • Spearheaded initiative to use machine learning to improve and accelerate character animation workflows

Lead Pipeline Engineer January 2022 - January 2023

  • Engineering lead for designing and building an Unreal-centered, multi cloud feature animation pipeline from scratch
  • Additionally set up the render farm & developed cloud-native farm workflows and tools directly inside Unreal
  • Regularly met with production to determine their requirements, timelines, and what technical challenges they’d be facing
  • Built tools and documentation to assist animation artists with using Unreal Engine to its fullest potential

DreamWorks Animation

Senior Engineer, Machine Learning January 2021 - December 2021

  • Created and led the AI initiatives at DreamWorks Animation, developing workflows, tools, and libraries with tensorflow to facilitate the application of machine learning techniques
  • Consulted with various R&D and production groups, offering technical guidance on integrating machine learning techniques including generative AI
  • Provided mentorship and supervision to junior ML developers, fostering proficiency in combining ML and CG techniques
  • Principal developer for proprietary deep learning-powered denoiser, which automated a process that took multiple artist hours into a compute minutes, saving hours of artist time per shot

Specialist Technical Director, Surfacing October 2015 - January 2021

  • Responsible for the technical side of feature Surfacing workflows, focusing on technical leadership, architecture, and development. Worked with the Heads of Departments, Workflow Directors, R&D directors and engineers, artists, and other TDs to provide technical solutions while mentoring new hires, serving on the Pipeline Development Standards committee, and developing training curriculum for the department.
  • Consulted on machine learning adoption, applications, deployment, and change management within feature animation.
  • Lead initiatives for new cloud-based Surfacing & Grooming pipeline and tools initiatives, which involved managing the work of direct reports, developing the overall architecture, running code reviews, developing, and engaging with the users to determine their requirements are met.
  • Responsible for driving adoption of third party software (Mari, Substance), communication of technical issues and feature requests with the vendors, and integration of the software within the surfacing pipeline.
  • Graphics programming, including custom shaders, for an initial in-house developed mobile AR app distributed to consumers.
  • Additionally responsible for authoring real-time shaders for texture generation, surfacing tools, cg application testing solutions, and investigating applications for machine learning within computer animation.

Technical Director July 2012 - October 2015

  • Developed tools and supported artists for the DreamWorks Animation production pipeline, primarily within the domains of surfacing (texturing & material development) and asset management.
  • Among other projects, worked on texture synthesis, the global material library, Mari plugins, automated log scraping and reporting, asset representation conversion, asset templating, Monkeys Of Mumbai,The Croods, and How To Train Your Dragon 2.

Education

Purdue University

B.S., Computer Graphics Technology · (2008 - 2012)

Publications

Barrett, C., Brown, J., Hartford, J., Hoerter, M., Kennedy, A., Hassan, R., & Whittinghill, D. (2014). Estimating Gesture Accuracy in Motion-Based Health Games. Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting, 11(Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting, Vol. 11 (2014)). https://doi.org/10.20385/1860-2037/11.2014.8

Whittinghill, D., Hartford, J., Brown, J., Hoerter, M., Kennedy, A., Barrett, C., & Hassan, R. (2014). Effect of Pregame Training Tutorials on Player Performance in Kinect-Based Health Games. Games for Health Journal, 3(1), 31–39. https://doi.org/10.1089/g4h.2013.0038

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