Habib Zargarpour

8111 - A podcast by Matt Wallin

Habib Zargarpour was born in Iran. He moved to Belgium at an early age (4th grade), moved to the south of France for high school, and Vancouver for university. For a time Habib was interested in airplane design but later gravitated towards architecture. Attending Art Center to study industrial design he honed his skills and interests. One of those interests took the form of doing a 3D design for a lawnmower on the computer. His work in the digital space continued to grow. After school he worked for numerous clients doing designs for things like a camcorder for Panasonic. Before graduating Habib landed a gig doing visual effects for “Adventures in a Dinosaur City”. He and a group of friends wound up doing three and a half minutes of CG effects for the project by developing their own tools. He later did work on the Roger Corman “Fantastic Four” creating the fire effects for Johnny Storm. Some time later, an opportunity to work at ILM came up on “The Mask”. For the next ten years he worked at ILM developing key tools on additional films including; “Twister”, 2 “Star Trek” films, “Star Wars: Episode 1” (the pod race sequence), “The Perfect Storm”, & “Signs”. In 2003, he left to work at Electronic Arts for the next seven years doing realtime rendering for games. He spent some time at Microsoft working on the Xbox team where he began work on the Photon project doing development work for James Cameron and Joe Letteri. He later landed a gig developing realtime previs tools for “The Jungle Book” and “Ready Player One”. He worked on “Blade Runner 2049” and “Greyhound” with Digital Monarch Media, which was later acquired by Unity. Today he’s working at Unity developing new techniques and realtime tools for virtual production and working on his own film “Squadron”. Habib is absolutely brilliant and one of the nicest people in the business. With every project he’s worked on he’s made an indelible imprint on the industry with boundless enthusiasm and excitement for the medium.