Mitch Prater
Shading Technology Supervisor at LAIKA Studios
Hillsboro, Oregon, United States
Summary
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RockstarMitch Prater is a veteran shading and lighting technologist with over three decades of experience bringing film-quality visuals to both feature animation and real-time projects. As Shading Technology Supervisor at LAIKA he designs and implements offline and real-time shading systems across productions including Kubo, ParaNorman, and Missing Link, and has led surfacing for unreleased CG features. His background at Pixar as Shading Lead and Senior TD on landmark films like Toy Story 2 and Cars, combined with earlier work in games at 2K, gives him a rare cross-disciplinary mastery of RenderMan, RIS, OSL, GLSL, Katana, Maya, Mari and Nuke. He pairs deep technical craftsmanship with production leadership, building shading libraries, custom shaders, and pipelines that scale from look development to final renders. Based in Hillsboro, Oregon, Mitch also has a history in academic instruction and scientific simulation, which informs his analytical approach to problem solving. Peers know him for translating complex artistic goals into practical, performant tooling that bridges offline and real-time workflows.
8 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
English
Github Skills (28)
katana10
renderman10
rendering9
rasterizer9
siggraph9
java9
shading9
computer-graphics9
hlsl8
llvm8
gstreamer7
3d-graphics7
materialx7
physically-based-rendering7
gnome7
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
LaikaStudios/shading-library
Aug 2018 - Oct 2022
Production Shading Library
Contributions:280 commits, 4 PRs, 148 pushes in 4 years 3 months
javaproductionshadingrendermanris
LaikaStudios/LaSh
Dec 2022 - Nov 2025
Reference implemenation of the Layering Displaced Materials with Thickness, Accumulation, and Size paper.
Contributions:1 release, 35 pushes, 4 branches in 2 years 11 months
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