- Nickname
- Marli Mar
- Height6′ 2″ (1.88 m)
- Marlin Rowley was born on January 3rd, 1970 in Washington, D.C. He was raised by both of his parents Inez and Navie Rowley. His siblings were sister Sharon Rowley and brother Anthony Rowley. Marlin attended Saint Anthony's Catholic School from 1st-8th grade. He then attended Riverdale Baptist High School from the 9-12th grade.
In January 1991, after a few semesters of college, he joined the U.S. Air Force to become an Avionics Guidance and Control Specialist. He worked on B-52 bomber aircraft for several years. After realizing that he wanted to delve into Computer Graphics (which was his passion at an early age), Marlin decided to attend college again part-time while still in the military. Feeling that the military could not challenge him intellectually any longer, Marlin let his contract with the Air Force expire in January of 1998 and attended the University of Maryland Baltimore County as a full-time student studying Computer Science with an emphasis in Computer Graphics.
The first project he worked on was Ice Age working as a Production Programmer at Blue Sky Studios. He wrote extensive look development tools such as the ConvertShader tool. He worked at Blue Sky for 2 years and then got a position as a Color & Lighting TD to work on the Matrix sequels at ESC in 2002. His role their was to create Mental Ray shaders using Maya and Mental Ray plug-ins. He quickly learned about Mental Ray in a full production environment. One of his many tasks there was to create a tool that would transfer Maya shaders into Mental Ray shaders for use with the renderer and then be able to switch them back so that Maya would give real-time feedback on the look of shaders.
At the close of production on the Matrix sequels, Marlin went to work on Shrek 2 at PDI/Dreamworks. He was hired as an FX developer there and learn a totally different pipeline in PDI's custom tools. He created tools that the artists used to make glitter in hair, raindrops on the surface of objects, and vines and fur with his first geometry shader.
As Shrek 2 came to a close in April 2004, Marlin went to work at Omation Studios in San Clemente where he was the principle graphics programmer. He created tools in XSI to allow users to be able to create custom textures which were being rendered by Mental Ray. Unfortunately, he was unhappy with the benefits that Omation provided and sought employment elsewhere.
In January of 2005, Marlin started work at Walt Disney Feature Animation as a senior software engineer. He has since created great tools for the look development pipeline as well as the FX pipeline. Marlin is currently involved in being the owner of the in-house volumetric renderer.
In November of 2007, Marlin left Disney Feature Animation and moved to Dallas, Texas to head up the rendering pipeline at ReelFX Creative Studios. He was employed as (December 2008) the lead Shader TD and has worked on various projects such as their own in-house RenderView for viewing rendered images as well as helping out with ReelFX's first full-length CG feature Free Birds.
In June of 2017, Marlin left the film industry to pursue the realtime tech industry at Lockheed Martin Missiles & Fire Control systems. He started to learn new technology such and VR/AR for future applications.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Marlin Rowley
- ChildrenRailyn Rowley
- Plano, Texas
- Burbank, California
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