Xinxin Zhang
Senior Computational Imaging Scientist
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolXinxin Zhang is a Senior Computational Imaging Scientist with 11 years of experience pushing the realism of computer-generated imagery through high-performance graphics, GPU-accelerated solvers, and light-field imaging. Based in Mountain View, she has built movie-quality fluid simulators and large-scale sparse linear algebra solvers using OpenGL, GLSL and CUDA, and contributed research that produced three SIGGRAPH papers during her PhD at UBC. Her work spans industry-leading studios and labs—Weta Digital, Pixar, and Lytro—where she developed vortex-based fluid solvers, GPU feature-adaptive subdivision, and automated actor extraction for light-field capture. She also implements novel fast-summation solvers for Poisson and heat-kernel problems that rival FMM in speed while simplifying implementation and GPU deployment. An active contributor to simulation and VFX tooling (including node-based Zeno systems and VDB manipulation), she bridges academic rigor with production-proven engineering. Notably, she combines deep math intuition with practical code craft to deliver scalable, film-quality visual effects and imaging systems.
11 years of coding experience
Master, Computer Science, Master, Computer Science at New York UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Graphics, N/A, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Graphics, N/A at The University of British Columbia / UBC
English
Github Skills (13)
gfx10
openvdb10
c-language10
3d-graphics10
cprogramming-language10
physics9
simulator9
simulations9
simulation9
mesh-processing8
linear-algebra8
graphics-programming7
shader7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
zenustech/zeno
Mar 2021 - Jan 2023
ZEn NOde system - a simulation & rendering engine in nodes
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Graphics/VFX Engineer
Back-end Developer & Graphics/VFX EngineerContributions:255 reviews, 986 commits, 488 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Xinxin's contributions primarily involved implementing and modifying rendering and simulation code within the Zeno node system. They introduced new nodes for VDB manipulation (merging, combining, and resampling) as well as for creating and applying force fields. Further contributions are found in integrating the Bullet physics engine for rigid body simulation, and creating tools for mesh processing and 3D noise generation.
rendering-enginevfxcppwebglnodes
zhxx1987/zhxx.github.io
Feb 2017 - Feb 2019
Contributions:1 push, 1 branch in 2 years
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