"Don" Rudy Cortes was born and raised in Ecuador. He has been working in the 3D animation industry for the past 7 years. He started his career in Kansas City, Missouri, as a generalist and demo artist for a local 3D software distributor and following that worked as a 3D visualization specialist for one of the countrys leading architectural and engineering firms. Rudy initially wanted to be an animator until a good friend introduced him to a small rendering program named BMRT. From that point on, he dedicated himself to learning RenderMan and all the techniques required to run a production with RenderMan. His film credits include The Day After Tomorrow, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow as a lighting and vfx TD, The Ant Bully as a RenderMan shader writer and TD, and the latest Disney movie Meet the Robinsons.


Saty Raghavachary is a Senior Trainer and Curriculum Manager in the Training Department at DreamWorks Feature Animation, where he also wrote graphics production software for 11 years. On a part-time basis, he teaches an introductory CG course at USC, and classes on Maya (MEL/Python), RenderMan, and visual math at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. His movie credits include Bee Movie, Shrek the Third, Flushed Away, Over the Hedge, Madagascar, Shark Tale, Sinbad, Spirit, The Road to El Dorado, and The Prince of Egypt. He was previously Software Manager at MetroLight Studios. Saty was awarded three M.S. degrees and a Ph.D. at The Ohio State University and also did postdoctoral research there. He is also the author of Rendering for Beginners: Image Synthesis Using RenderMan.