W. Taylor Holliday

Summary

Developer of Sculptura, iOS 3D sculpting app (http://sculptura.app).
Developer of Audulus, iOS/macOS Modular Synthesis App (http://audulus.com).
Graphics Software Engineer at Pixar Animation Studios (http://www.pixar.com).
Computer graphics research internships at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. (http://www.llnl.gov).
MS in Computer Science, University of California, Davis. BS in Computer Science with Honors, UC Davis.
Expert with Swift, SwiftUI, C++, and Metal/MSL. Proficient with Rust, Lua, Python.

Experience

Indie App Developer, Audulus LLC 2012-Present

Designed and implemented Audulus, a real-time audio processing and synthesis application for musicians. Currently available for iPad and Mac. See http://audulus.com.

Sold thousands of copies worldwide. Reached the top five paid music apps on iPad.
Won Electronic Musician Magazine Editor's Choice award, 2017.
Featured on Mac App Store, front page, February 2017.
Featured on iOS App Store "New Apps We Love", February 2017.
Built a welcoming, active user community.
Hired sound designers and support staff.
Received praise and coverage in industry magazines and blogs (Tape Op, Musicradar, Synthtopia, CDM).
Designed and implemented a polyphonic audio synthesis engine from scratch, with no prior DSP experience.
Implemented an immediate mode approach to multitouch UI.
Open-sourced the 2D GPU renderer used to render the UI. See http://github.com/vger.
Applied software engineering and testing practices which resulted in a robust system without technical debt.
Produced demo videos and promotional materials for each new version.

Designed and implemented Sculptura, a high-resolution virtual clay sculpting app for iPad. See http://sculptura.app.

Used a GPU-based volumetric approach yielding higher resolution and a less technical UX than other sculpting apps on iOS.
Implemented a performant immutable data model for volumetric models.
Built a deferred renderer with PBR lighting.
Hired and worked with artists to optimize tools and workflow, and produce content.
Hired UX designers to ensure first-class UX and aesthetics.

iOS Software Engineer, Inkling Systems, San Francisco 2011-2012

Improved visual quality and optimized performance of Inkling's iOS 3d model viewer.
Implemented a new and robust system for updating content on iOS.
Contributed to the GUI changes required for Inkling for iPhone.

Graphics Software Engineer, Pixar Animation Studios 2006-2011

Worked on Pixar's next-generation proprietary animation software.

Developed a real-time character pose-sculpting system with optimizations to suit character rigging workflow.
Created a pose interpolation system using radial basis functions to assist character rigging.
Implemented various surface deformation and point weighting algorithms.
Wrote numerous unit, regression, and performance tests.
Created GUI customized for film production workflows.
Worked closely with film production staff to test and deploy features.
Implemented collision detection for hair simulation with a robust and novel approach using a tetrahedral mesh.

Graphics Research Internships, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 2004-2005
Graduate Student Researcher, IDAV, UC Davis, Davis, California 2004-2006

Developed new algorithms for computing topological properties of scientific data-sets. See http://wtholliday.github.io/thesis.pdf.

Open Source

rui - Rust UI library inspired by SwiftUI 2022 Star

Emphasis on clean, user-friendly API, with minimal requirements on client code. Cited as an influence for other Rust UI efforts.

vger - GPU vector graphics library 2021 Star

Used in Audulus. Simple, but also minimal CPU usage. Original path rendering technique.

AudioKit - iOS/macOS realtime audio library 2020 Star

Major contributor. Overhauled AudioKit for V5.

Tonic - Swift library for music theory 2022 Star

Emphasis on chord analysis. Primary contributor.

Patents

Tetrahedral Shell Generation US9639981B1

Graphical user interface for performing deformations US8970628

Education

Master of Science in Computer Science, 2006, University of California, Davis.

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with Honors, Minor in Mathematics, 2003, University of California, Davis.