Sebastian Sylwan has left Autodesk to join Weta Digital as head of R&D. Sylwan served as Autodesk Media & Ent.'s senior film industry manager since 2007, with particular emphasis in stereoscopic technology. In fact, he wrote the final "Digital Eye" column for VFXWORLD in February: "Stereoscopic 3-D and the Future of Visual Storytelling".

Sylwan will be overseeing the overall facility R&D efforts. Weta is currently working on James Cameron's AVATAR, Steven Spielberg's TINTIN: SECRET OF THE UNICORN and Peter Jackson's THE LOVELY BONES.

Prior to Autodesk, Sylwan was director of technology at Digital Domain, where he successfully renewed its technology infrastructure and helped it venture into stereo. He also served as principal technology advisor at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. In this capacity, Sylwan led the Light Stage 6 project, which entailed co-design and construction of the world's largest and most-advanced reflectance field capture device. Light stage technology is used for computer graphics research and is now present in many of the most advanced Hollywood feature films' visual effects pipelines.

While living in Italy, Sylwan built Lumiq S.p.A, the country's largest production, post-production and 3D character animation studio.