Drew Hess

London, UK

Currently

Previously

I taught 3 semesters of Bootstrap at middle schools in Daly City and Oakland, and a couple of Scratch classes in Oakland.

I volunteered at KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy, helping them improve their GNU/Linux lab.

I developed the real-time lighting component of the Industrial Light & Magic Zviz previz system. You can read a bit about it here.

I also worked with Lucasarts on real-time lighting and material systems for use both in Lucasarts's new game engines and in ILM's 3D animation system. You can read a little about that work here and judge for yourself in Lucasarts's The Force Unleashed.

Prior to those projects, I worked at ILM mainly on real-time multimedia playback and image processing, and did a small amount of Linux kernel hacking.

I was a microprocessor architect at Intel, working on the Intel/HP Itanium architecture.

Elsewhere

GitHub

Mastodon

Keybase

Free Software Projects

I develop a handful of free software projects, all of which are available at GitHub.
I maintained the OpenEXR free software project from its initial release in 2003 until 2006, when I left ILM. OpenEXR is now the defacto standard file format for high dynamic range (HDR) images, and has been used in the making of countless films. (Note that I'm no longer actively involved in the project, so please direct your questions to the current OpenEXR maintainers.)

Published

"The OpenEXR File Format," Florian Kainz, Rod Bogart and Drew Hess. GPU Gems, 2004.
OS and compiler considerations in the design of the IA-64 architecture, Rumi Zahir, Jonathan Ross, Dale Morris and Drew Hess. ASPLOS 2000.

Presented

HDR in Film Production, part of Paul Debevec's HDR course at SIGGRAPH 2006.
OpenEXR Image File Format, a sketch at SIGGRAPH 2003.

Trivia

A couple of film credits.

I was an (uncredited) extra in the Outlander Club scene in Star Wars Episode II. I didn't get my own action figure, sadly. This does, however, mean I have a Bacon number of 3, via Natalie Portman and several other actors.

OpenPGP key ID

My key is available on most public servers. I have older keys that have expired or been revoked, so please use my latest one:

pub   rsa4096/0x2A20D2096BABEC61 2019-05-20 [C]
      Key fingerprint = F2B9 0CD1 A963 4E3D BF29  AE6C 2A20 D209 6BAB EC61
uid                   [ultimate] Drew William Hess 
uid                   [ultimate] Drew William Hess 
uid                   [ultimate] Drew William Hess 
uid                   [ultimate] Drew William Hess 
sub   rsa4096/0x4DC0BBFBE3FEF428 2019-05-20 [S] [expires: 2023-11-17]
sub   rsa4096/0x3FD78476A03FE7B6 2019-05-20 [E] [expires: 2023-11-17]
sub   rsa4096/0x63CDB6B49C39ADF5 2019-05-20 [A] [expires: 2023-11-17]

Assuming that you trust my previous OpenPGP key, you can read my signed transition statement for verification of the new key.