Professional Bio
Daniel E. Wexler wrote the renderer at PDI/DreamWorks used on dozens of commercials and films including Batman & Robin, The Arrival, Antz, and the Academy Award winning Shrek and sequels. After six years at PDI/DreamWorks, Wexler joined NVIDIA in 2002 to work on Gelato, the first GPU-based film production renderer used in Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D, Resident Evil: Extinction, and the award winning short film The Plush Life. Later, he founded and managed the Advanced Developer Technology group, championing the developer perspective in the design process for future chip architectures. Mr. Wexler is the Late Breaking Chair for Siggraph 2010 and 2011, the General Submission Chair for 2012, a four year veteran of the Siggraph Unified Jury, published in High Performance Graphics and GPU Gems with multiple presentations at Siggraph and Eurographics. Currently he is developing mobile applications that he wanted when he was a teenager through his new company, WexWorks.
Background
I was at NVIDIA beginning in 2002, where I worked on the Gelato GPU film renderer for six years before switching to Developer Technology where I managed the Advanced DevTech group to champion the role of the developer in NVIDIA’s future chip design process.
I used work at PDI/DreamWorks where I wrote and support the renderer we use for Antz, Shrek and film effects work. I was at PDI for seven years and have screen credits in Shrek, Antz, Batman and Robin, and The Arrival. After Shrek won the first Oscar for Best Animated Film we all got to take our picture with the statue.
Before PDI, I worked at Xaos Tools where I worked on a secret project which never amounted to much, along the same lines as places like Kalieda or anyone else who thought they could write some sort of scripting package to handle multimedia. Actually, I spent most of my time working on a neat little image processing package that also ended up in the trash. Before Xaos, I worked at Sun Microsystems where I worked in Technical Marketing for the advanced graphics products and helped write demo programs for Siggraph.
I married Emily Sklar on August 26th, 2000. We moved to Soda Springs between; Auburn and Truckee in the winter of 2000. I continued to work remotely for PDI until I started at NVidia in July 2002. I work for three weeks at home and then spend a week in the office down in the Bay Area.
Emily and I both grew up in Palo Alto. That’s a satellite image of Tolman Drive, where parents live. The big white building in the middle is a water tank. The hexagonal buildings are Lucille M. Nixon Elementary School and the building on the right side of Page Mill Road is the Hewlett-Packard headquarters.