Frank Vitz

Frank Vitz has been creating computer graphics, animation and visual effects since the early 1980’s when he started his career as Technical Director at Robert Abel and Associates in Hollywood where he eventually held the position of V.P. of production. While at Abel’s Frank won several Clio awards for his work in television commercials. He also created some of the first CG effects in a major motion picture for the Disney movie Tron.

During the 90’s Frank worked as an independent VFX supervisor, developing innovative digital visual effects for movies including Judge Dredd, Stargate, and Xmen 1 and 2. He also designed visuals for Theme Park rides such as “The Adventures of Spiderman” in Orlando, and “In Search of the Obelisk” for the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.

Frank  worked at  Electronic Arts during the 2000's helping to leverage the convergence of Hollywood visual effects with the world of Next Gen video games. Frank's first gig at EA was to create the World Wide Visualization Group (EA’s advanced Research and Development Group) in Vancouver. This role presented him with unique opportunities to push the envelope of new graphics and animation techniques for video games. Projects included the development of several concept videos and tech demos, procedural animation tools and physics informed animation controllers. He  worked as CG Supervisor on several games including Basketball and Fight Night Round 4 and the acclaimed SSX snowboarding game.

Frank’s next role was Creative Director with the Frostbite Development team at DICE in Stockholm Sweden.   Frostbite is the adavnced software engine that powers many of EA's AAA titles including Battlefield, Mirror's Edge, Plants Vs. Zombies, Mass Effect,  Star Wars and more.  Frank worked with the Frostbite development team and community of Frostbite game teams to push the artitistic and technological capabilities of the system.  Frostbite matured while Frank was at DICE and it is now rolling out across EA to power many new games in multiple genres.  Working with the Frostbite team provided Frank with an opportunity to move forward the artistic and technological convergence that brought him from movies to the gaming industry in the first place.

Over the last two years Frank was leading the CRYENGINE team at Crytek in Frankfurt Germany. CRYENGINE is arguably one of the most powerful real time engines on the planet.and Frank worked with the team to extend its capabilities into the domains of Virtual Reality. Augmented Reality and beyond. Frank and his team provided the pipeline and tools that Crytek used to create popular VR launch titles including  "The Climb" on Oculus Rift,  and "Robinson the Journey" on PSVR.  Frank also co-directed "VRScore - Sky Harbor," the VR benchmark produced in collaboration with Basemark.

Today frank is at AMD where he is leading a new team dedicated to integrating support for advanced AMD GPU features into real time engines including Unreal, Unity, Lumberyard and CRYENGINE. This effort includes driving all the latest AMD advances such as Liquid VR, MGPU, Asynchronous Compute, Multi Res and Foveated rendering, and a lot more. He will also be leading a new team to showcase these modifications and enhancements in examples and real time demos.

A common theme in Frank’s work is figuring out how to fit the pieces together; to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts.