March 9, 2005

ELECTRIC IMAGE CO-FOUNDERS JOIN NEWTEK

SAN ANTONIO, TX - Two former Electric Image founders have joined the NewTek LightWave 3D team. Jay Roth comes to the company as VP of 3D product management, bringing with him 25 years experience in the 3D visual effects and graphics industry. And Mark Granger, a leading 3D graphics and rendering programmer, has signed on with the LightWave development team to improve and advance the capabilities of NewTek's 3D product.

Roth served as CEO of Electric Image while the company achieved numerous milestones, including the development of a professional 3D application for the Mac, the creation one of the world's fastest renderers, and impressive visual effects for the destruction of downtown LA in James Cameron's "Terminator 2."

In addition to his role as co-founder and CEO of Electric Image, Roth has vast experience in the visual effects industry, beginning in 1980 working at Roger Corman's New World Pictures with Academy Award-winners James Cameron and Robert and Dennis Skotak. Roth's product management expertise extended beyond his role at Electric Image when Sony appointed him to design and supervise the 3D compositing environment for Socratto, an unreleased film compositing product.

Granger's notable achievements include the development of the Electric Image rendering engine, Camera, which is widely regarded one of the fastest and highest-quality renderers on the market. The EI Renderer is capable of rendering extremely complex scenes containing many millions of polygons in just a few minutes, even when fully anti-aliased at film resolution.

As co-founder of Electric Image, and the technical visionary behind their leading professional 3D animation system, Granger was responsible for the development of a series of breakthrough technological advances, including the invention of a very efficient rasterizing hidden surface algorithm, the invention of the motion vector blur algorithm, and the invention of a volumetric light ray and smoke engine.

He is also responsible for the creation of the Mr. Font program, the first to successfully convert Type 1 Postscript fonts into high quality 3D meshes, and the Mr. Nitro plug-in, which was used to blow up Los Angeles in "Terminator 2."