Former DoD and NSA cybersecurity executive brings nearly four decades of technical and mission leadership to advance the IGEL Adaptive Secure Endpoint Platform™ (IASEP™) across Zero Trust, cyber resilience, AI, and multi-framework governance for Government and Critical Industries globally
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Oct. 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- IGEL®, a global software company delivering the IGEL Adaptive Secure Endpoint Platform™ (IASEP™), today announced that Randy Resnick, a recognized Zero Trust leader and architect, has joined IGEL as Field CTO, Government and Critical Industries.
Resnick brings nearly four decades of technical, cybersecurity, and program leadership spanning the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and National Security Agency (NSA). Most recently, as Senior Advisor and Director of the DoD Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office, Resnick led the Department's efforts to develop, coordinate, and operationalize Zero Trust across one of the world's largest and most complex technology environments.
He authored the original DoD Zero Trust Strategy and helped pioneer the DoD and National Security System Zero Trust Reference Architectures, Maturity Model, Innovation Labs, and independent assessment approaches. His work successfully moved Zero Trust from a theoretical concept into an implementable national defense strategy. Previously, Resnick spent over 34 years at the NSA in senior technical leadership roles, including Zero Trust Strategic Lead, Cybersecurity Innovations Director, Chief of Information Assurance Engineering, and the first Chief of the NSA Red Team. His contributions have earned him honors such as the 2024 Wash100 Award and recognition as a 2024 CyberScoop 50 Cybersecurity Visionary.
"Randy is recognized internationally for his leadership in Zero Trust, but what makes him particularly important as an advisor to IGEL customers and partners is his ability to take transformational cybersecurity concepts from strategy and architecture through program development and operational implementation," said Klaus Oestermann, CEO of IGEL. "That combination of technical vision, leadership and execution is exceptionally well aligned with the next phase of market adoption of the IGEL Adaptive Secure Endpoint Platform™."
Bridging National Security Frameworks to Commercial Critical Infrastructure
Resnick's decision to transition from leading the defense sector's Zero Trust strategy to a commercial software leader serves as a powerful market validation of IGEL's platform approach. IGEL is advancing IASEP™ to address the enterprise edge where IT, OT, cloud, applications, containers, open-source technologies, AI, and users converge. The platform combines control, data, and execution planes to enable organizations to apply policy, establish trusted execution, and generate governance evidence across diverse workloads.
Resnick will help expand these capabilities, directly translating national security-grade frameworks into battle-tested architectures for commercial critical infrastructure and government sectors alike, including financial services, healthcare, transportation, energy, and utilities. His mission will extend internationally across NATO and Five Eyes countries, as well as Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the Middle East.
"IASEP™ gives us the opportunity to apply these lessons more broadly and securely to the enterprise edge, bringing together trust, resilience, and governance across IT, OT, and emerging workloads in an architecture that organizations can easily operationalize at a scale of their choosing," said Resnick.
John Walsh, Senior Vice President and Field CTO, Government and Critical Industries at IGEL, added: "Having known Randy for many years through his work at the NSA and later watching him lead the strategic development and implementation of Zero Trust within the Department of Defense, I am extremely confident in Randy's technical leadership, program discipline, and ability to turn transformational ideas into operational capability at extraordinary scale."
Extending the Architecture Through the Ecosystem
Resnick's role will involve close collaboration with customers and across IGEL's product, engineering, partner, and go-to-market organizations to translate requirements from government and critical industries into repeatable platform capabilities. This work will also integrate with the IGEL Ready ecosystem, combining IASEP™ with technology partners across silicon, identity, networking, SASE/SSE, cloud, virtualization, and AI. This effort contributes to increasingly sophisticated security and operational outcomes, from identity, segmentation, and comply-to-connect through workload isolation, contextual policy, observability, resilience, and governance.
About IGEL
IGEL® is a global software company delivering the IGEL Adaptive Secure Endpoint Platform™, a trusted and governed endpoint platform for secure access to cloud, VDI, DaaS, SaaS, Secure Browsers, enterprise applications, as well as OT endpoints. At its foundation is IGEL OS, an immutable operating system that helps reduce endpoint attack surface, preserve a known-good endpoint state, and support secure access across distributed work environments. Through the IGEL Preventative Security Model®, the platform adds attested workload delivery, centralized governance, and contextual enforcement, aligning endpoint security with Zero Trust and SSE/SASE architectures from key IGEL Ready partners.
IGEL Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery™ (BC&DR) helps organizations restore secure access on Windows endpoints affected by ransomware, other cyberattacks, or outages. Founded in 2001, IGEL is headquartered in Germany with U.S. offices in San Francisco and Fort Lauderdale, working with an ecosystem of 130 leading technology brands. Learn more at www.igel.com.
Windows is a trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.
** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **
IGEL Appoints U.S. Zero Trust Leader Randy Resnick to Advance the IGEL Adaptive Secure Endpoint Platform™ Strategy
SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Reallusion's 2026 3D Character Contest was held from June 1st to October 1st, 2026. Within 3 months, 200 submissions were submitted from 49 countries. The contest showcases the best 3D character design and animation created using Reallusion's powerful character production ecosystems: Character Creator for 3D character creation, iClone for facial and body animation, and AccuRIG for rigging.
"We at Reallusion are thrilled to watch so many world-class character artists integrate Character Creator and iClone into their professional workflows. This contest clearly demonstrated that Character Creator gives artists complete creative freedom to build original 3D characters in any style or genre. Huge congratulations to every participant. We are excited to keep pushing the boundaries of 3D innovation for the community!"
– Enoc Burgos, Reallusion Director of Partnership Marketing
Prizes Sponsored by Renowned Industry Leaders
The Contest was hosted by Reallusion and sponsored by industry leaders such as NVIDIA, Maxon, Epic Games, Unity, SideFX, Marvelous Designer, MSI, WD, and CenterGrid. Through this contest, Character Creator's extensive pipeline lets artists seamlessly integrate a new workflow for rapid creativity with zero sacrifice in character quality.
Meet Our Winners And Their Testimonials
The contest challenged artists to create stunning, original 3D characters that not only showcased their artistic abilities, but also demonstrated mastery of animation tools like Character Creator and iClone. After weeks of careful evaluation by our esteemed panel of judges, the following winners stood out for their exceptional work.
Watch winner video: https://youtu.be/zhGfrHHtT7Y
Realistic Character Design
Under this category, entrants create a realistic human character in Character Creator by combining the character base with tools like ZBrush, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Blender, Wrap, Texturing.xyz, and Maya. Watch their winning entry and testimonials below.
1st Place: Jax: Soul of the Street – by Jimmy Watelle, Manager | Costa Rica
"Character Creator and the Blender Data Link helped me a lot in building the base of the Jax character, but I also faced numerous challenges related to my skill level and navigating between software, sometimes losing data or synchronization along the way. This project brought me as much enjoyment, and it helped me grow tremendously." – Jimmy Watelle
View Jimmy's entry and WIP
2nd Place: Shannaz – by Leudemar "Leo" Lima, Concept Artist | Brazil
"Character Creator helped me bring my design to 3D with a lot of fidelity and realism; easy to use and intuitive, CC5 is a really powerful tool for concept artists." – Leudemar "Leo" Lima
View Leo's entry and WIP
3rd Place: An Unearthly Find – by Jeet Shah, Technical Artist | India
"The speed of CC5 in making changes to primary forms for any character is impeccable and probably the best among any 3D software I've ever used. Need a skinny short girl- tweak a few sliders you get a skinny short girl. Need a fat stubby creature- tweak some more sliders and take it to ZBrush and you have a humanoid creature in under an hour all the while maintaining the subdivided geometry details in CC5 thanks to GoZ Plus. And all of them with a full-body skeleton that's ready to add some controls for posing. The new HD morphs in CC5 are certainly an upgrade to the previous version, where the lack of base mesh resolution made the morphs a bit less detailed; the new ones still come out quite detailed. One other feature I've heavily used is the new addition to Auto Setup for Maya. That allowed for a seamless experience in making the facial expressions on the characters directly in Maya, where I rendered them."– Jeet Shah
View Jeet's entry and WIP
Stylized Character Design
Under this category, entrants create a stylized character in Character Creator by combining the character base with tools like ZBrush, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Blender, Wrap, Texturing.xyz, and Maya. Watch their winning entry and testimonials below.
1st Place: Kohaku - Warden of Memories – by Oscar Fernandez Gonzalez, 3D Character Artist | Spain
"As a sculptor, Character Creator lets me start from a clean, optimized base mesh that I can freely customize in ZBrush. Moving back and forth between ZBrush and CC5 allows me to use each application for what it does best, making the entire workflow faster and more efficient. My favorite feature is being able to test poses on the character with incredible precision. It's fast, intuitive, and a genuinely enjoyable part of the creative process." – Oscar Fernandez Gonzalez
View Oscar's entry and WIP
2nd Place: Erlen From Lemuria's Savage Lands – by Felix Enrique Yaguare Lopez, Student and Freelancer | Venezuela
"Character Creator allowed me to bring my character to life effortlessly. Being able to quickly test and iterate different poses gave me the freedom to explore Erlen in multiple situations, something that would have been impossible in my timeframe, as I joined the contest a month and a half late while finishing my class projects for Libel Academy." – Felix Enrique Yaguare Lopez
View Felix's entry and WIP
3rd Place: Alyssa – by Thivolan Moodley, 3D Sculptor & Freelancer | South Africa
"I was able to use the base mesh to really push the design from start to finish without needing to retopologize or change much else! This helped me focus on sculpting and likeness more!" – Thivolan Moodley
View Thivolan's entry and WIP
Realistic Character Animation
Use iClone to create a realistic animation for a character made with the CC3+ Base. The character model can be customized with Reallusion tools and content or third-party software like ZBrush, Blender, Unreal Engine. Watch their winning entry and testimonials below.
1st Place: Franco Colapino – by Off World, FCGI Cinematics Freelancer | Argentina
"Without Reallusion's tools, achieving this level of quality and ease of iteration in pursuing our goal would not have been possible; the power and creative freedom it provides are immense." – Off World
View Off World's entry and WIP
2nd Place: The Hunt – by Joseph Hoback, 3D | United States
"There's no way I could have gotten as far as I did without the use of an iClone. The mocap informed not only the timing and energy but also the character as a whole." – Joseph Hoback
View Joseph's entry and WIP
3rd Place: Special ops: Lioness – by Hector Mercado, CGI artist & Filmmaker | Dominican Republic
"The new Headshot 3 features, together with the AI-assisted reference image generation and cleanup, really help in getting the character likeness when trying to create a digital double!" – Hector Mercado
View Hector's entry and WIP
Stylized Character Animation
Under this category, contestants use iClone to create a stylized animation for a character made with the CC3+ Base. The character model can be customized with Reallusion tools and content or third-party software like ZBrush, Blender, Unreal Engine. Watch their winning entry and testimonials below.
1st Place: STONE GODZ – by Dazhi Benjamin Sokomba, Animator | Nigeria
"I used iClone for the final real-time render, Character Creator 5 for the main character and AccuRIG for the stone characters." – Dazhi Benjamin Sokomba
View Benjamin's entry and WIP
2nd Place: Moss Fairy – by Affan Shiekh, CGI artist | Pakistan
"Character Creator 5 is amazing. It gets better every year, and I would like more implementations for the Blender addon!" – Affan Shiekh
View Affan's entry and WIP
3rd Place: Max Mad Animation – by Soorena Sardarzadeh, CGI artist & Filmmaker | United States
"With iClone, making animation isn't harder than it needs to be." – Soorena Sardarzadeh
View Soorena's entry and WIP
Best AccuRIG Characters
Powered by AccuRIG, artists can transform static models into fully animatable characters, regardless of topology. The winning characters showcase high sculpting details with attractive poses and professional renders. Reallusion selected four winners from this category, and here are the winners, entries, and respective WIPs.
- Oscar Fernandez Gonzalez (Spain)
- Laura Antonacci (Italy)
- Carolyna Figueiredo (Portugal)
- Stasia Bubnova (Russian Federation)
Special Awards
Special Awards recognize outstanding achievement across specific technical and artistic categories. Beyond their distinctive visual aesthetics, these winning entries demonstrate a deep mastery of 3D pipelines and creative problem-solving techniques. Their entries present compelling character designs, solid anatomy, and exceptional composition. View all winning entries and WIPs.
Best Render
- Vanesa Arambašić (Croatia)
- Jacopo Filo della Torre (Italy)
- Bahar Tavakoli (Iran)
Best Pipeline Use
- David Sujono (Australia)
- Olivier Beguin (Switzerland)
- Ignacio Coronel (Argentina)
- Joachim Jensen (Denmark)
- Jorge Leonardo Ayala Arias (Colombia)
Best Mocap Use
- Sangkoo Lee (Republic of Korea)
Best Digital Double
- Mobin Hivehchi (Iran)
- Frederick Talavera Martinez (Spain)
Best Student Artwork
- Carlos Humberto Rivas Garcia (Venezuela)
Best Costume
- Eva Sophie Cringle (Belgium)
- Myron Mortakis (United States)
- Massimo De Antonis (Italy)
- Saillish (Australia)
- Weedi Masindraoka (Madagascar)
- Sadegh Khavand (Iran)
- Rafael S. Benedicto (Philippines)
- Angel Ricalde (Peru)
Honorable Mentions
Honorable Mentions celebrate standout entries that captivated the judging panel through exceptional dedication, skill, and creative vision. While not taking home a top placement, these artists delivered remarkable craft and passion throughout the competition. View all Honorable Mention entries and WIPs.
- Ariya Hasani (Iran)
- Markus Haertel (Brazil)
- Kurt Boutilier (Canada)
- Onur Erdurak (Turkey)
The judging process for the "2026 Reallusion 3D Character Contest" proved to be quite difficult and took many hours of deliberation. In addition to the top 3 placements in Best Character Animation & Best Character Design, Reallusion also selected 28 winners for AccuRIG characters, Special Awards, and Honorable Mentions. See the Winner Page for winner details and showcases, and we look forward to your entry submission next year!
** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **
Reallusion's 2026 3D Character Contest - Meet the Winners!
