Richard Jones
Senior R&D Engineer at Industrial Light & Magic
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Jones is a Senior R&D Engineer based in London with a decade of experience building tooling for FX and large-scale crowd and fluid simulations in leading VFX houses like Industrial Light & Magic and DNEG. He combines deep research credentials (EngD in Computer Graphics) with hands-on production engineering, developing Houdini and OpenVDB integrations and custom simulation systems used on demanding visual effects pipelines. Richard has contributed to the widely used open-source OpenVDB project, improving its AX code-generation and Houdini bindings—work that bridges low-level performance engineering with artist-facing tooling. His background in mathematics and crowd dynamics informs a pragmatic approach to physically based simulation and scalable tool design. Colleagues rely on him to translate complex research into robust, production-ready software that balances performance, control, and maintainability.
10 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
MMath, Mathematics, First Class Honours, MMath, Mathematics, First Class Honours at University of BathEngD, Computer Graphics, EngD, Computer Graphics at Bournemouth University
English
Github Skills (8)
openvdb10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
houdini9
volume-rendering8
gfx8
cplus7
cpp7
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
AcademySoftwareFoundation/openvdb
Dec 2020 - Oct 2022
OpenVDB - Sparse volume data structure and tools
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 58 reviews, 31 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the `academysoftwarefoundation/openvdb` repository by implementing and modifying code related to the AX (Advanced Expression) system, used for volume data manipulation. Their work involved debugging and enhancing the ComputeGenerator, TernaryOperator, and BinaryOperator classes within the AX code generation framework. The user also made changes to the Houdini integration (SOP_OpenVDB_AX.cc) by adding attribute bindings, fixing bugs, and refactoring the parameter handling.
vfxvoxelizervolume-renderingsparsec-plus-plus
richhones/openvdb
Dec 2020 - Mar 2024
OpenVDB - Sparse volume data structure and tools
Contributions:34 pushes, 21 branches in 3 years 2 months
sparsedata-structurevolumeopenvdb
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