As it was in December 2011.
| Name: | Aras Pranckevičius |
| Date of birth: | 1981 May 20 |
| Residence: | Kaunas, Lithuania |
| E-mail: | nearaz at gmail dot com |
| 2006 - present | Troublemaker at Unity Technologies (official job title 'Graphics Architect'). Working on Unity game/media development tool. Empowering developers to create kick-ass games and interactive content! Some of my work includes realtime shadowing system, Direct3D 9/11/Flash based renderers, large part of the rendering pipeline, OpenGL ES 2.0 shader compilers, optimizations, multi threading, Unity web browser plugin for Windows, Unity editor development on Windows and so on. In general I do anything that is needed: rendering code, shaders, optimizations, platform specific code, documentation, supporting the customers, doing conference presentations, fighting driver bugs, creating my own bugs and fixing them, leading the graphics team, trying not to lead the graphics team etc. You get the idea. I've seen the company grow from 3 to 150+ people, it's quite an amazing thing to watch! |
| 2004 - 2005 | Senior software developer at Alna Software. All kinds of "usual software"; using C++/C#, various databases, CAD systems, document management systems etc. |
| 2005 Feb-Apr | Contractor for Wireframe Dreams Studios. Implemented physics for RTS game PSI: Syberian Conflict. C++, ODE physics library with custom tweaks. |
| 2004 Aug-Oct | Contractor for Microsoft; developed 3D viewer for Imagine Cup 2005 Visual Gaming competition (see here). |
| 2001 - 2004 | Researcher & software developer at Interamotion LLC. We were almost trying to do what Microsoft did 10 years later with Xbox 360 Kinect: a system for controlling games by physical motions, driven by cameras observing the player. We did R&D on the computer vision system, as well as the engine, toolchain and a 3D fighting game. It didn't really go anywhere though, so we did a bunch of other stuff as well; smaller computer vision demos, small games and contracting work. I worked on the computer vision systems, 3dsmax asset exporters, various parts of the engine/toolchain. Worked mostly with C++, STL/Boost, HLSL, Lua, maxscript. |
| 2000 - 2001 | Developer at Geras Partneris Software. Web, e-commerce and accounting projects. Used Java, Swing, J2EE (JBoss), databases, Castor. |
Recent open source projects are on github. Old freetime and non-commercial projects are here. I've been doing various game / graphics stuff since 1994, starting on Sinclair / Atari XE, moving onto PC; and a bit of PlayStation One. Worked alone and with some friends.
Full list of papers & articles on Papers page.
Soft Projected Shadows (2006)
ShaderX4: Advanced Rendering Techniques, Charles River Media, ISBN 1-58450-425-0.
Tips and Tricks for D3DX Effects Based Renderer (2006)
ShaderX4: Advanced Rendering Techniques, Charles River Media, ISBN 1-58450-425-0.
Fake Soft Shadows Using Precomputed Visibility Distance Functions (2004)
ShaderX3: Advanced Rendering With DirectX And OpenGL, Charles River Media, ISBN 1-58450-357-2.
Shaderey - NPR Style Rendering (2004)
ShaderX3: Advanced Rendering With DirectX And OpenGL, Charles River Media, ISBN 1-58450-357-2.
Did presentations at SIGGRAPH, Develop, Unite etc. Full list on Papers page.
| 2006 & 2007 | Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in DirectX award. |
| 2005 | First place in Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2005 realtime rendering competition. |
| 2004 | scene.org "breakthrough performance" award for Syntonic Dentiforms demo. |
| 2004 | Second place in Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2004 realtime rendering competition. |
| 2003 | First place in ATI / Beyond3D shader programming competition. |
| 2003-2005 | Kaunas University of Technology, Master degree in Computer Science. Master's thesis was "Rendering Soft Shadows in Real Time" (see here). |
| 1999-2003 | Kaunas University of Technology, Bachelor degree in Computer Science. Thesis was on real-time cloth simulation and rendering (see here). |
Married, has two daughters; occasionally plays classical guitar, takes photos, watches demoscene demos, launches kites or rides a unicycle.