Marty is a creative problem solver who uses his knowledge, experience, passion, vision and leadership skills to inspire the team, drive toward clarity, anticipate complications (and prevent them if possible) and maximize the chances for success. He enjoys problems that straddle the boundary between the artistic and the technical and especially collaborations with talented and passionate people when the goals are clear but the means are not so.
For the past seventeen years, Marty has worked productively in simulation and training, animated feature films, theme park attractions, games and education. One key realization is there exists a core of common knowledge and skills at the foundation of all these areas. Marty works deliberately to increase his intuition about the structures and patterns in this foundation. He is an active mentor in the workplace and also helped build educational programs to both teach the skills and transfer the intuition.
Marty taught Digital Media at the University of Central Florida and most recently consulted on issues associated with improving digital media education in Florida. In simulation and training, Marty worked in university research, as well as on commercially developed training systems. Aside from writing lots of code related to graphics, simulation and interprocess communication, he was involved with virtual and mixed reality studies, selective fidelity simulation models and designing architectures to support dynamic, distributed virtual environments. He was a principal on developing architectures to support dynamic terrain and fluid models within a distributed interactive simulation across a heterogeneous network. While many of the prototypes had a military theme, Marty also helped champion use of the technologies for training fire service and emergency management personnel. For example, he developed prototypes for training fire service personnel on situational awareness and incident command and later was technical lead/architect on a training system for emergency managers intended for delivery to every county in the United States.
Now for the fun side of Marty! Marty has experience in several entertainment areas. He was a Technical Director at Walt Disney Feature Animation, where his credits include the feature films Mulan and Lilo and Stitch. He was one of the principals on the development of the animation system used on Mulan and the architect for the studio-wide render pipeline. In addition, he worked in the trenches as a digital artist helping to create CG elements and wrangling production scenes. Marty was also a technical art director at Electronic Arts during the development of the Superman Returns game, where much of his work involved shaders and pipelines. He also has some involvement with ride films. While at Disney he worked on the Pooh's Hunny Hunt attraction for Tokyo Disneyland and later he consulted on unrelated prototypes.
After a tour as a paratrooper in the 82d Airborne Division, including a rotation in the Sinai desert, Marty graduated summa cum laude from the University of Central Florida in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. In 2004 he completed his Master of Science in Computer Science, also from the University of Central Florida. He is a member of ACM and SIGGRAPH, was a speaker in The Art of Disney's Mulan course at SIGGRAPH in 1998, and was the technical director for the EDGE at SIGGRAPH in 1994. In 2003-2004 he was a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee, where he wrangled the Student Animation Competition for the 2004 conference. Marty was also a speaker at the iDMAa (International Digital Media & Arts Association) conference in 2004 and a jury member for iDMAa IDEAS Exhibition that same year.
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