Rafael Vasquez

I spent eight years on real-time rendering at Pixar — first in the lighting team, then on the renderer that became the basis for several of their interactive tools — and four years at Unity working on the URP. I left in 2022 to write books and make short films from Mexico City.

I return to Lattice each year to teach GPU & Graphics Programming. Ten weeks. Twenty students. We start with a software rasterizer, end with a small WebGPU renderer with a working ray-traced material, and along the way the students stop being intimidated by linear algebra. Mostly.

I'm not a teacher by training — I am, by training, a former animator who got curious about the math. I teach the GPU course the way I wish someone had taught it to me: with patience, with a lot of pictures, and with the consistent reminder that this is just geometry, plus some accounting.

The rest of the year I'm in Mexico City making short films. The films use, broadly, the same renderer the course builds. This is not a coincidence — I treat the course as a moving research project for my own work, and I'm honest with the students about that.