Emily Weihrich
Software Engineer at Pixar Animation Studios
Emeryville, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolEmily Weihrich is a software engineer at Pixar with eight years of professional engineering experience and a background that blends technical direction, simulation pipeline work, and production-focused tooling. Trained as a computer engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, she progressed from TD intern and technical director roles into back-end software development, specializing in graphics, simulation, and scene description technologies. At Pixar she contributes to OpenUSD, improving UsdKatana integration, point instancer performance, angular velocity support, and material/Look handling—work that demonstrates deep knowledge of USD scene graphs and production asset pipelines. Her toolkit spans C++, Python, OpenGL, Maya, and web/graphics tooling, underpinned by practical experience across Linux and macOS production environments. Comfortable bridging art and engineering, she brings both animation-aware sensibilities and systems-level optimization to large-scale visual effects projects.
8 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Engineering at University of Pennsylvania
Github Skills (4)
cprogramming-language10
katana10
c-language10
usd10
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (1)
PixarAnimationStudios/OpenUSD
Aug 2017 - Jan 2023
Universal Scene Description
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:31 commits, 31 comments in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Emily primarily contributed to the `openusd` repository, focusing on improving the UsdKatana integration. Their work included modifying the bounding box calculation, re-unifying core and site operations for reading point instancers, adding support for angular velocity, and optimizing the point instancer reader for improved performance. The user also addressed material assignments and Look rescoping, demonstrating a strong understanding of USD data integration and scene graph manipulation.
universal-scene-descriptionscene
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