Emmett Lalish
Senior Software Engineer at Wētā FX
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEmmett Lalish is a Senior Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance algorithms across 3D graphics, computational geometry, computer vision and controls, currently at Wētā FX in Wellington. He earned a PhD in aerospace controls by 24 and has repeatedly bridged academic rigor with product engineering—leading <model-viewer> at Google and contributing PBR lighting and tone-mapping improvements upstream to the widely used three.js library. His work spans hands-on systems (FPGA particle filters, GPGPU surface reconstruction) to standards and tooling (Khronos glTF PBR groups and 3D manufacturing formats), showing a knack for turning research into shipping software. Emmett has invented and patented novel formats and streaming approaches for volumetric video and rearchitected robotics stacks to enable continuous motion with far smaller codebases. He focuses on inventing pragmatic, measurable algorithmic gains—often in rendering accuracy and performance—that solve real-world production problems. Based in New Zealand, he blends aerospace-grade controls thinking with a designer’s attention to visual fidelity.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at University of WashingtonAssociate of Science (A.S.), Engineering, Associate of Science (A.S.), Engineering at Olympic College
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (6)
webgl10
pbr10
threejs10
javascript10
shader10
3d9
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
mrdoob/three.js
Aug 2019 - Dec 2022
JavaScript 3D Library.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:107 reviews, 98 commits, 58 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Emmett made several updates to the `three.js` library, specifically related to improvements in the handling of materials, shading and lighting. These changes focused on the implementation and refinement of physically based rendering (PBR) techniques, including the addition of geometric anti-aliasing, and improvements in handling environment maps, transmission, and reflections within the library. Furthermore, the user addressed issues with cubemap-related shaders and examples, and helped with examples to correctly showcase different shading models.
virtual-realitysvgwebglcanvasjavascript
mikkoh/model-viewer
Oct 2021 - Dec 2021
Easily display interactive 3D models on the web and in AR!
Contributions:9 commits in 1 month
3d-modelswebgljavascriptthreejs3d
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