I’ve been programming for some time now, starting off with games and generally useless experiments for school. My first ever tool written for a VFX facility was to handle motion control data translation between SideFX Prism’s and a Kuper Controls rig with the natural progression from utility scripts, to shaders, plugins and now full applications.
I claim that I’m versed in a selection of languages covering a range of applications. Most notably – C/C++, Objective C & Cocoa, Python, OpenGL, Maya API, Renderman SL and RIB API, Mental Ray API, Nuke SDK and Mel.
GPU programming became interesting during my tenure at EA where I was exposed to hardware shading for the Sony Playstation and XBox consoles and now use both NVidia’s Cuda and OpenCL in a handful of my own research projects.
More recently my sights have turned to the iPhone and iPad ( along with the rest of the world ), web application development and visualization techniques.
Liquid
Originally written for personal use, Liquid is a Maya to Renderman translator I developed over 10 years ago that had the luxury of evolving while I was at Weta during Lord of the Rings. It has since been released into the open source community with various companies taking advantage of it with murmurs of a Liquid 2.0 project evolving.
Other
Other VFX tools I’ve written may include something to do with muscle and skin dynamics, procedural geometry, vfx pipeline, compositing, natural phenomenon, crowds, plants, rendering, etc.