Wayne Wooten

GVU Impact Award Winner

GVU alumnus Wayne Wooten was honored for his lasting contributions to both Georgia Tech and Pixar in computer animation. He has gone on to become a significant figure in the special effects industry and has credits on a number of major motion pictures: A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, and Ratatouille.

As one of GVU’s earliest students, Wooten put the group on the world’s special effects radar in 1993 when he oversaw the first submission from GVU to be accepted to SIGGRAPH’s electronic theater in 1993. The film was called Deus ex Machina and it was about a Victorian era machine shop that “comes to life” after all the workers had abandoned the warehouse. It was shown on the big screen alongside special effects sequences from major motion pictures like Jurassic Park as well as pieces from other professional animation studios. “Looking back with 14 years of perspective helps me realize that the biggest impact was on the students who had worked on the project. From the core folks who worked on it, most ended up in jobs in the film/effects industry,” said Wooten.

Wooten continues influencing the lives of Georgia Tech students by frequently visiting GVU and talking to ambitous students who want to follow in his footsteps.

After receiving his Ph.D. from Tech in 1998, Dr. Wooten has gone on to have a major impact at the intersection of academic research and industrial innovation. Wooten worked extensively with a method called “ray-tracing,” used in production for generating very detailed and realistic reflections and shadows. Before Wooten’s efforts, ray-tracing was never considered a viable technology for use within the RenderMan software.

Additionally Wooten developed a new RenderFarm management system for the movies Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo. This new software allowed users to easily track the frames they submitted for rendering across a large cluster of machines (about 2000 at the time).
Wooten continued to make significant contributions to the research and development of Pixar’s RenderMan software. This software is used as the foundation to create all of the company’s movies. The software is also sold to all the major visual effects and movie studios. Incredibly, it has been used on 41 of the last 44 films that have been nominated for a Best Visual Effects Oscar by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences.

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