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No, but really – welcome! Thanks for checking out this blog. It brings me great joy to have a place to chart the many discovers I stumble upon during this wonderful journey. Before I dive into my many quirks and related aspirations, I suppose introductions are in order.
My name is Connor Wendt and I was born in Omaha, Nebraska. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Nebraska, those of us who were chosen to start our journey from such a magnanimous state are birthed directly from a stalk of corn. After less than a year and a few tons of corn later, my parents and I traveled around for the next decade – eventually finding respite in the great land of maple syrup and reasonable hospital bills – Ontario, Canada. Fast forwarding through hockey, Nintendo 64 and all of the snow, we eventually landed in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I currently live. I spent the majority of my childhood pretending Pokemon were real, watching Saturday morning cartoons and nurturing a growing obsession with all things digital – which brings us to today. Pokemon are still real, I love Tom and Jerry and I have a passion for yelling at shaders and low-level API while my 90lb. lapdog, Blue, is forced into the role of “adorable therapist”.
Sticking with the topic of low-level API and graphics, I have been given the honor to work with the Simulation Rendering team of the project Wayfinder for Acubed, Airbus as an intern starting June 13th, 2022. Wayfinder is a project with a simple, but not easy, goal in mind – automate flight. How does one, “automate flight”, you might ask. Well, to oversimplify, there are two means by which this is achievable – both requiring an unbelievably large amount of data pertaining to all of the conditions that an aircraft is subjected to and all of the options available to the pilot given the state of the craft and weather. The first way we could go about this is to fly millions of planes into the sky, taking precise measurements as we go, then feed that data to a bunch of hungry, little machine learning bots. A bit expensive, though? The other option is to realistically simulate all of relevant conditions, then “fly” millions of “planes” into the simulated sky, taking precise measurements as we go, then feed THAT data to our hungry, little bots. Much less expensive, yes? To avoid a barrage of criticism, I’d like to emphasis that I’ve egregiously oversimplified this process. There’s quite a bit of work between “siMuLate sKy” and “mAke pLaNe fLy bY itSelF”. Regardless, I’m unbelievably excited to get to work.
Given my future work, I found the “Simulation Challenge” project in the CS 467 project listings unsurprisingly interesting, while also a bit vague. I may have been a bit hasty to toss in my vote here, because who knows, it could mean anything! I’ve spent a bit of free time simulating volumetrics, hydraulic erosion and particle interactions, to name a few, so I’m pretty open – unless it’s requires hours of connecting the Matrix to Simulation Theory (I don’t think my fragile ego could take it).
Tying all of this simulation mumbo-jumbo together, I would absolutely love to work on developing and maintaining the rendering systems of an interactive application one day. Game Engines are the first types of applications that come to mind, but any interactive, graphical tool needs to be built upon an engine of some kind. Like many of us, I spent a lot of my early development time building crappy, little games while having an unbelievable amount of fun doing it. I love stories and I love art – so I naturally love movies and video games.
To wrap things up, I love all things graphics. I’m not particularly gifted, but I am passionate and love to learn. I try to keep my humility by frequently reminding myself that I’m not the best, nor am I the worst, but I’m likely right where I need to be. I love teaching others because that’s how I really learn; I love being taught because that’s how I tend to grow. And at the end of the day, I hope to contribute to projects that can make someone’s life just a little bit better.
Thanks for reading.
Connor