Welcoming Philip to Arcol

I’m excited to announce an awesome addition to the Arcol team. Philip is joining us from Google 🎉

Philip has spent the last few years at Google working on Filament — a PBR renderer written in C++ that is multi-platform. Before that he worked at companies like Nvidia and Pixar. He’s also credited in “Brave” and “Monsters University” 🤯

Here’s a little from Philip:

I see Arcol as the culmination of my career; there’s literally nothing I’d rather work on right now! I am truly excited for the future of professional web-based 3D software, and proud to be a part of its inception.

I started tinkering with WebGL as soon as it was released in 2011. One of my first web apps was an interactive gallery of mathematical knots. I’ve always been captivated by the aesthetics of mathematically defined geometric objects. As a teenager, I sometimes flipped through an old computational geometry book from my father’s bookshelf, published in 1979. It was filled not only with equations, but also beautiful wireframe figures of idealized curved surfaces.

I grew up in Huntsville, AL. It’s known for being the birthplace of the Saturn V rocket and the headquarters for Wernher Von Braun.

After Apollo got off the ground, some of the Saturn V engineers left and started their own graphics company. This became Intergraph Systems, which at one time was Alabama’s largest corporation. As a schoolchild I went on a field trip to the Intergraph campus and got introduced to the CAD workstations there. I was instantly hooked; since I was already toying with BASIC programs that drew simple geometrical shapes, the sophistication of 3D modeling software seemed unfathomable and alluring.

I started my career at an Intergraph spinoff called Intense3D. Our Wildcat line of graphics cards were specifically designed for professional CAD workstations — not video games! After we were acquired by 3Dlabs, we launched the world’s first implementation of a standardized high-level shading language for OpenGL. It’s amazing to think that we started that work 20 years ago! In the time since, I’ve had the privilege of developing graphics software at NVIDIA, Pixar, and Google. Now that I’m at Arcol, I’ve come full circle, and back to being a pioneer in the world of professional 3D modeling.

A core part of my thesis for building Arcol is to focus on having a small, lean team that is incredibly talented. We are patient with finding the right people to bring to Arcol, it pays off when we get to work with people like Philip.

You can find Philip on LinkedIn and Twitter….. (or IMDB)

Paul