Brandon Montell
Lead Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBrandon Montell is a Lead Technical Director and hybrid software engineer/tech artist with 11 years of experience building production tools and procedural environments for feature films and interactive experiences. Based in San Francisco, he leads a technical art team at Pixar creating procedural sets for Toy Story 5 while prototyping cross-department technology—ranging from hair simulation workflows to VR previs and 2D-in-3D effects. He has a strong record at Google and Pixar shipping consumer AR features and creative tools, and contributes UI improvements to high-profile open standards work such as Pixar’s OpenUSD usdview. Brandon also designs playful personal projects—currently building a VR singing game, Sock Puppet Superstar—and founded Magic Bean Labs to explore that vision. Comfortable across C++, Qt, Unity, and shading/renderer pipelines, he blends systems-level engineering with a designer’s sensibility to turn creative experiments into reliable production tools.
11 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Computer Science at Brown University
Github Skills (5)
camera10
controls10
user-interface10
qt10
usd10
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (3)
PixarAnimationStudios/OpenUSD
Apr 2020 - Jan 2022
Universal Scene Description
Role in this project:
UI Developer & Software Engineer
UI Developer & Software EngineerContributions:8 commits in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Brandon primarily focused on enhancing the user interface and usability of the usdview application within the Universal Scene Description (USD) framework. Their contributions involved implementing camera controls, specifically allowing panning with alternative key combinations, and ensuring correct viewport sizing across different display configurations. They also consolidated free camera settings into a unified UI and added an option to lock the aspect ratio. The user demonstrated an understanding of Qt-based UI development and its integration with the USD pipeline.
universal-scene-descriptionscene
Lunacy-Audio/HISE
Jun 2020 - Nov 2021
The open source framework for sample based instruments
Contributions:31 pushes, 4 branches, 1 comment in 1 year 5 months
musiceagleaudio
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.