Hakan ‘Zap’ Andersson
Most Recent Affiliation(s):
- Mental Images
Bio:
SIGGRAPH 2013
Håkan “Zap” Andersson is a rendering developer at Autodesk. He previously worked at mental images—where his official title was “Shader Wizard”—and created many of the most commonly used mental ray shaders in existence today. Zap is a native of Sweden, with an engineering degree in electronics and a CAD industry background. He wrote his first renderer around 1986 for the Swedish ABC80 computer, with a graphics card he hand-wired himself.
SIGGRAPH 2008
Hakan ‘Zap’ Andersson has been working as “Shader Wizard” at mental images since 2004 and is the author of numerous mental ray shaders, such as the the subsurface/skin shaders, the car paint shader, as well as the architectural- and production shader libraries. Prior to mental images, Zap worked at EMT, Genius CAD Software, and Autodesk where he wrote software and designed user friendly interfaces for advanced mechanical design software, as well as authored two US patents. Originally educated as an Engineer in Electronics, Zap’s passion for computer graphics caused his graduation year “special project” to be an actual hand-built and hand-wired graphics card, for which he wrote his first ray tracer – a program that eventually evolved into his own rendering engine RayTracker. Today Zap spends his days (and nights) writing shaders, documentation and tutorials for mental ray, and sometimes makes presentations at user events and conventions, as well as maintains a mental ray tips blog (mentalraytips.blogspot.com). Occasionally he also makes little experimental visual effects movies, and he has a background in music production.
