Navigation

English

Deutsch

Portrait

About me

Curriculum vitae

Name	Frank Alfred Tovar
Birthday	27.09.1984
Birth place	Caracas, Venezuela
Nationality	German
Civil state	Married
Address	August-Metz-Weg 5, Ap. 331 64297 Darmstadt Germany
Mobile phone	+49 151 11553651
Email	frafam

Education

1990-2003	German school "Colegio Humboldt" in Caracas, degree: A-levels (Abitur)
2002	Study trip to Mexico (3 weeks)
2003	Stay abroad for 6 months attending the german school of Quito, Ecuador
01.10.03 - 30.06.04	Basic military service in Kastellaun and Mainz
01.10.04 - 07.07.08	Completed bachelor studies in computer science at the Johannes-Gutenberg university Mainz. Key subjects Realtime image processing and 3D-Computervision Communication networks, client- and serverside web applications Music informatics as elective courses Computer graphics Bachelor's thesis Realtime motion planning for cameras in dynamically changing virtual environments (PDF) Demo program Final mark: good (1,7)
01.04.09 - 30.09.09	Diploma studies in computer science at the Westfälische Wilhelmsuniversität Münster. Key subjects Artificial intelligence Logic calculus and their application in computer science

Work experience

05.07.04 - 31.10.04	Internship in the IT department of the Ministry of education, science and research Rhineland-Palatinate Migration of a NT 4.0 network of 400 clients to Windows XP + Windows Server 2003 Development of a file manager
01.02.05 - 31.12.05	Student trainee in the IT-client support department of IBM Mainz Installation, configuration and maintenance of client and server software (Windows and AIX)
01.02.06 - 01.03.06	Internship in the QA department of Phenomic Game Development Testing of SpellForce 2: Shadow Wars
2007-2008	Graduate assistant in the computer science institute of the Johannes-Gutenberg university Mainz Trainer to the computer graphics lectures
01.07.06 - 31.03.09	Software developer at PROVISIO GmbH Development of the 3D-accelerated photo managers Pictomio. Used technology: Visual C++ 2008, WTL 7.5, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, DirectX + DirectShow, MSXML. Development of the add-on pictoGEO, which adds geotagging support for Pictomio. Embedding of a web-browser object to display Google Maps or Live Maps, created own extensions for the maps. Development of a GPU-accelerated JPEG decoders with nVidia CUDA Development of a DirectX-based image slideshow screensaver Continuation of the development of SiteKiosk 7
01.04.09 - 30.09.09	Graduate assistant in the computer science institute of the Westfälische Wilhelmsuniversität Münster Trainer to the algorithmic geometry lectures
Since 01.10.09	Software developer at PROVISIO GmbH

Private and university projects

FAMily Raytracer	University project Development of a raytracer from scratch Design and implementation of a procedurally generated scene in 5 days Link to the project website (http://raytracer.xtr1m.com)
TIM 3D	University project The original plan was to create a 3D version of the well-known classic The Incredible Machine The project mutated to become a generic graphics engine Download the space demo (TODO!)
Project Space: A new dimension	Browser game Cooperation with Jens-Fabian Goetzmann Concept, design and development of a space build-up strategy game Design and development of the GUI and ingame graphics All components were entirely self-developed (amongst others a private messaging system, an internal forum, and so on) Used technologies: PHP, MySQL und AJAX Link to the game (http://www.project-space.de)
Distance based raymarcher	Private project Implementation of a raymarcher as software renderer, or alternatively using GLSL or CUDA Procedurally defined scene via distance fields Link to the description of the used method Download demo images (TODO!)

Activity in the demoscene

Handle	xTr1m
Group	Blu-Flame
Releases	The following intros were released at demo parties: Crystal Cowboy (4k Intro), 4th place at tUM 2007 Fractoblob (4k Intro), 2nd place at evoke 2008 Space Colony (4k Intro), 4th place at tUM 2008 Valleyball (4k Intro), 4th place at breakpoint 2009 Lunaquatic (4k Intro), 1st place at evoke 2009 Timeless (PC Demo), 6th place at Function 2009 Link to the download page (http://blu-flame.org/prods.php)
Internal tools	To aid the development of the intros, I developped following tools: A software synthesizer using GM.DLS or FM audio synthesis. Optionally using DirectSound or the waveOut API. A GLSL compiler to compress shader code with the purpose to make it as small as possible. An own assembler-like language and a fitting VM which parses the opcodes in realtime.

Skills

Languages	I can speak and write in the following languages: Spanish (mother-tongue) German (native language) English (fluent) Italian (moderate)
Development tools	Visual C++ 2005-2010, Visual C# 4.0 (Silverlight, WPF), Eclipse JDK
Patterns & practices	MVC, MVVM
APIs	DirectX (HLSL), OpenGL (GLSL), .NET Framework 4, Qt 4, OpenCV, CUDA
Web development	XHTML, PHP, JS, XML, MySQL, MSSQL 2005&2008, CSS, Adobe Flash
Graphics software	Adobe Photoshop, Inkscape
Audio tools	Puredata, Q, Faust, Reason, Audacity, ModPlug Tracker
Operating systems	Windows 3.1, 95, 2000, XP, Vista, 7. Ubuntu 6.06 - 8.10
Document creation	MS Office 2003&2007, LaTeX (TeXnicCenter + MikTeX / LyX)
Version control & bug tracking	CVS, SVN, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Bugzilla