Santi Gonzalez
Graphics programmer
About
Graphics programmer
Hello everyone! I am Santi Gonzalez (he/him, aka Santi Paprika on the internet), a 25 year-old computer scientist located in Oslo (previously in Dublin, and originally from Barcelona) with a strong passion for graphics.
My main areas of interest belong to the realm of real-time rendering. Specifically, I’m interested in translucency (SSS, OIT…), shadowing, global illumination, LOD and scalability, GPU optimization, PBR materials, among many many others.
In my free time, you will probably find me playing videogames 🎮, playing the bass 🎸, or messing around with tech stuff (usually graphics-related) 💻.
Oh, and I also enjoy hanging out with people from the outer world from time to time.
The following subsections briefly describe my background on the field.
I am currently working as a Rendering Programmer at Funcom, contributing my grain of sand on Dune: Awakening (Dune open world survival MMO).
[2019]
Internship at Plyzer: I was in the AI and Computer Vision research team.
My task was to identify different features from images and classify them in custom categories, and extract similarity factors between some of them.
[2019-2020]
Stance in the Full-Body Interaction Lab (FubIntLab), at UPF: For my bachelor’s degree final project I worked in a small team to develop augmented reality (AR) experiences for Barcino roman heritage site through novel AR paradigms.
[2020-2022]
Solo development and maintenance of an addon focused in time management and stats for the game World of Warcraft, with +3.5K downloads by the time being.
[2021-2022]
Collaboration with the Interactive Technologies Group (GTI) as a Research Assistant, at UPF: In the context of my master’s thesis, I explored, implemented, and analyzed techniques for real-time realistic hair rendering.
[2021-2023] Graphics Researcher at Huawei (Ireland Research Center), exploring real-time human rendering techniques and contributing to O3DE.
I did my high school years in Girona (Spain), my hometown, and then moved to Barcelona in 2016 to course the Bachelor’s degree in Audiovisual Systems Engineering (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, UPF). By the end of the degree, graphics and games were my main fields of interest, so I decided to deepen my knowledge on them by pursuing the Master’s Degree in Innovation and Research in Informatics, specialized in Computer Graphics & VR (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC).
I have also followed some other online courses (among others):
So, I am a musician as well.
I play the bass guitar since 2010, when I was 11-years-old.
I’ve been part of multiple bands through these years.
Some of my recordings and projects are listed here:
Here’s a couple of images of my cat Lofi. Enjoy.
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