Hi,

It was suggested by my professor, Doug James (Cornell University), that I apply for an internship or full-time position in the research department. In particular, I am interested in the internship for MPM/FLIP research and the Software Engineer position working on Hyperion. As of this May, I will have completed my Masters of Engineering at Cornell University and am very excited about continuing to work in simulation and graphics. From the original Tron to Big Hero 6, Disney is constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible in movies. The prospect of being a part of that process and working on movies that create so much enjoyment is incredible. I believe that my passion, skills, and interests would make me a valuable addition to the team and that I would fit well into Disney’s culture.

Over the course of my graduate program at Cornell I have focused on interactive graphics applications. My projects include three games and several physics simulations with the goal of exploring what it takes to create interesting gameplay and realistic effects. While developing these projects I have learned a lot about rendering, software design, and innovation. One project that I worked on for several months was an implementation of “Position Based Fluids” (Macklin 2013). While I had a working implementation, written in Java, at the end of my first semester, I found myself spending a multitude of hours continuing to develop it during my winter break. Even though the class for which the project was for had ended, I wanted to improve the performance and rendering because I found the original videos so inspiring. This led to a rewrite in C++ and many hours teaching myself new rendering techniques such as how to render foam. It even resulted in several interesting conversations with the actual author of the paper and a lot of new insight about how he attained his results. Finally, it encouraged me to push the project further and implement two way coupling between fluid and cloth which became another fun project. Throughout this experience, I discovered that I enjoyed working on these systems so much that it never felt like work (although the friends and family that I constantly badgered with details about my projects might not feel the same way).

Another project that I am still in the midst of working on is an implementation of “A Material Point Method for Snow Simulation” (Stomakhin 2013) for my physically-based animation class (under Professor James). While it is still in the middle of development, I have found the method to be very interesting, especially after coming from the pure particle-based method of Position Based Fluids. As mentioned in the paper, I think that there is a lot of potential for GPGPU techniques and expanding the method to other types of simulation. I would love to have the opportunity to continue working on similarly fascinating projects post-graduation.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best,
Joel Gross