2025 Speakers
Mai Ao, Senior Technical Lead of SideFX Labs, SideFX
Mai Ao is the Senior Technical Lead of SideFX Labs with 7 years of Houdini and game industry experience and a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Early in his career, he worked on high-profile real-time projects in collaboration with Walt Disney Imagineering and Industrial Light & Magic. At SideFX, he now leads a team of technical artists to create production-ready, artist-friendly Houdini tools for the Labs open-source package and provides technical consultation to game studios. He has released many popular game dev tools, including the exporters and shaders for vertex animation textures and flipbook textures, which are widely used across the industry in both AAA and indie titles. Passionate about mathematics and solving practical problems, Mai has developed new algorithms and techniques such as multi-revolutions-per-frame quaternion slerp, high-frequency icosahedral normal compression, spectral feature extraction, conditional VAT, and more. He has delivered talks on tech art, real-time VFX, and programming at SIGGRAPH, GDC, Inside Unreal, and the Everything Procedural Conference.
