Dark Star Systems
Software for people who make images
Dark Star Systems builds visual-effects, graphics, visualization and imaging software, drawing on 40 years of experience, from massively parallel supercomputers to Emmy Award-winning visual effects. Curiosity is the key: I create everything from open source build tools to climate visualizations to AI experiments and beyond.
Get in touchConsulting
Hands-on engineering and senior technical advice, for studios, plugin developers and software companies.
Visual effects & plugins
Effect design, OpenFX plugin and host development, and image-processing algorithms, from a co-creator of Sapphire Plug-ins.
GPU & high-performance imaging
Fast, correct pixel pipelines in C++, CUDA, OpenGL and WebGPU: performance tuning, parallel algorithms and architecture.
Fractional CTO
Technical strategy, architecture reviews, development process, and technical due diligence for acquisitions, from someone who has led R&D through two exits.
Builds & tooling
Cross-platform C++ builds, CI and release engineering, from a longtime SCons maintainer and the author of pcons.
Selected work
Sapphire Plug-ins
Co-developed and led 20 years of development of the visual-effects suite used across film and TV, as CTO of GenArts (now part of Boris FX).
OpenFX
Chair of the Technical Steering Committee for the Academy Software Foundation's open standard for visual-effects plugins.
pcons
A modern Python-based software build tool, inspired by SCons and CMake, published by Dark Star Systems.
BioViz Studio
A web app that helped molecular biologists and chemists make beautiful, professionally designed videos of their molecules.
About
Dark Star Systems is the consulting and product company of Gary Oberbrunner. Gary started as a hardware engineer at Masscomp, wrote parallel graphics software for the Connection Machine at Thinking Machines, and was chief architect at Advanced Visual Systems. He then spent 20 years as VP Engineering and CTO of GenArts, where he and Karl Sims won an Engineering Emmy Award for Sapphire Plug-ins, and became CTO of Boris FX when it acquired GenArts. He then started Dark Star Systems to do scientific visualization and visual-effects consulting.
Gary also chairs the OpenFX Technical Steering Committee and is president of Long Now Boston. He holds a BSEE from MIT.
Let's talk
Have a visual-effects, imaging or high-performance computing problem, need help getting started with AI coding assistants, or need an experienced technical advisor? I'd be glad to hear about it.
garyo@darkstarsystems.com