Steam Profile

 Jason L. Mitchell

Jason has been a Software Engineer at Valve since 2005 and has worked on real-time game rendering for a variety of Valve's games as well as Source Filmmaker. He even got to apply his latent CAD skills during a stint as a 3D modeler on Left 4 Dead 2, modeling and texturing over 125 models for the game. Most recently, he worked on the VR game Half-Life: Alyx. After release of the game, he wrote and edited 35,000 words of technical scripts for the game's Developer Commentary feature, which shipped in November 2020.

Prior to joining Valve, Jason was the lead of the 3D Application Research Group at ATI (subsequently acquired by AMD). Jason has published papers and articles on a variety of topics in real-time rendering and has spoken at a number of graphics and game development conferences around the world.

Jason received a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati. He has also studied at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and worked in Tsukuba, Japan through the National Science Foundation Summer Institute in Japan.
Professional Activities
Publications and Technical Reports
  • Denis Kovacs, Jason Mitchell, Shanon Drone and Denis Zorin, "Real-Time Creased Approximate Subdivision Surfaces," ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, 2009. Video
  • Pedro V. Sander, Natalya Tatarchuk and Jason L. Mitchell, "Early-Z Culling for Efficient GPU-Based Fluid Simulation," ShaderX5: Advanced Rendering Techniques, Wolfgang Engel, Ed., Charles River Media, 2007.
  • Jason L. Mitchell, "Motion Blurring Environment Maps" in ShaderX4, Wolfgang Engel editor, Charles River Media, 2006.
  • Jason L. Mitchell, "Light Shaft Rendering" in ShaderX3, Wolfgang Engel editor, Charles River Media, 2004.
  • Jason L. Mitchell, "Poisson Shadow Blur" in ShaderX3, Wolfgang Engel editor, Charles River Media, 2004.
  • Pedro V. Sander, David Gosselin and Jason L. Mitchell, "Methods for Real Time Skin Rendering" in ShaderX3, Wolfgang Engel editor, Charles River Media, 2004.
  • Alex Vlachos, David Gosselin and Jason L. Mitchell, "Self-Shadowing Characters" in Game Programming Gems 2, Mark DeLoura editor, Charles River Media, 2001.
  • Alex Vlachos and Jason L. Mitchell, "Refraction Mapping for Liquids in Containers" in Game Programming Gems, Mark DeLoura editor, Charles River Media, 2000.
Conference Materials
  • Hacking Next-Generation Programmable Graphics Hardware, CS 101.3: Hacking the GPU : Graphics Cards and the Future of Scientific Supercomputing. Caltech  Oct '02
  • Applications of Next-Generation Programmable Graphics Hardware, Evans and Sutherland Distinguished Lecture Series. University of Utah, 7 October 2002
  • DirectX 9 Shaders & Hardware with Richard Huddy at the Game Developer's Conference Europe. London, 29 August 2002
In the Media
     
Jason got to contribute to the writing and voiceover work for a video describing player locomotion in Half-Life: Alyx
     
Upon the release of Half-Life: Alyx, Jason and colleagues talked to some press outlets such as UploadVR and CNET about the development process. He also talked to Shacknews about the subsequent release of Developer Commentary
     
As a former writer and editor, Jason wrote a piece on how his time writing for his college paper led to a career in game development for the 50th Anniversary Issue of the CWRU Observer.
     
Jason and Gabe discussed technical aspects of bringing Valve games to the Mac, just after Steam's Mac release, on The Conversation, which was also picked up by Ars Technica.
     
Jason wrote a piece on the process of making the Left 4 Dead intro on the Left 4 Dead blog
Jason presented portions of ATI's WinHEC 2004 keynote
Jason wrote a brief article on pixel shaders for the Spring 2004 issue of gameSTATE.
: Jason gave an interview about shader and 3D graphics hardware technology to the Japanese online site 4gamer.net during the 2003 Game Developer's Conference.
: The following article appeared in the Nov 2000 issue of DOS/V Power Report:
     
Polygonal Jason appeared in the RADEON preview in the April 2000 issue of Maximum PC