Accomplishments
Accomplishments
MaxPlay, Inc
- Principal Artist on a number of demos using Maxplay’s Game Dev Suite
Red Fly
- Created VFX and “Big Moment” Animations for “Dead Run” (working title)
Merge Interactive
- Art Director on 6 titles
- Star Wars Clone Trooper – plug-n-play TV game
- Duck Commander – Duck Dynasty plug-n-play TV game
- Zombie Hunter – The Walking Dead plug-n-play TV game
- Field ‘n Stream Fishing – game for Windows 8 and Mac
- Big Buck Hunter Pro Adventure – for Windows 8 and Mac
- Bass Pro Shops: The Strike: Pro Angler – for iOS
- Ensured quality, consistency, performance & memory standards
- Responsible for finding and hiring contractors, outsourcers
- Managed outsourcing for environments, characters & animations on several projects
- Mentored artists
- Animation, Rigging, and Effects work on several projects
- Collaborated on company strategy & game design
- Wrote a number of MEL scripts and other tools for automation
Red Fly
- Art Producer on an unannounced next-gen title
- Ensured that memory and performance constraints were met for a number of games, including Thor (Wii, 3DS) and Star Wars: TFU2 (Wii)
- Led team of artists on Food Network: Cook or Be Cooked! (Wii)
- Collaborated on game design and team strategy
- Developed look and feel
- Ensured quality and consistency
- Managed outsourcing
- Character TD, effects, animation
- Designed and managed outsourcing of AutoChop: MaxScript tool to streamline cutting up food art
- #1 bug writer on project, and among top 10 bug-fixers (#1 art bug fixer)
- Put together a budget mocap studio
- Effects work for several projects – Ghostbusters, Mushroom Men, Cook or Be Cooked, Star Wars: TFU2, Thor, and others
- Character TD work including FaceRig: face rigging tool and how-to docs used on numerous projects
- Batch animation exporter and other automation MEL scripts
Spacetime Studios – Blackstar
- Led team of character artists, animators and technical artist
- Ensured quality and consistency; aesthetic and tech reviews for all character art, animation, and character art tools
- Collaborated with Art Director and Vision Director to set standards for visual bar
- Estimated detailed art budget for entire project
- Assisted with scheduling and tracking of deliverables
- Built and maintained character art pipeline
- Documented character art / animation pipelines
- Character rigging in Max and MotionBuilder
- Designed and collaborated on art tools implemented by programmers and technical artist
- Skeletal template, skinned mesh and animation tree editors
- Autoskel and Autorig – utilities automating standardized skeleton construction and character rigging
- Collaborated in design of Material Templates – tools for ensuring DX9 shader quality and consistency
- Collaborated in design of numerous other editor and exporter features
- Outsource management
- Served as primary contact for numerous art outsource houses: created outsource packages (with complete samples, documentation, tools and concepts), ensured quality and consistency and timely delivery by providing complete and timely feedback
- Deliverable scheduling, asset tracking, and outsource house cost and capability tracking
- Team leadership – collaborated with leads on team strategy
- Character and animation production art and pre-visualization
Sony Online Entertainment – Star Wars Galaxies
- Character asset tracking and management
- Character / Live Lead – aesthetic and technical reviews for all character / wearable art and animation; scheduling and tracking of deliverables
- Art integration – delegated creation of art assets / communication with programming, design, and art teams, technical writing – documentation of art processes
- Lead artist on major gameplay revamp expansion
- Mentored teammates with Maya / technical issues
- Integral in setting up Art Pipeline for characters, animation
- Animation – Managed player character animation for the whole game – envisioned and executed style across the game with animations done by multiple people in and out of house, animated most of player characters’ animations
- Rigging for characters and creatures
- Invented animation system using dynamics for exploding body parts (for droids)
- Motion capture
- Established mocap pipeline – Investigated mocap studios; Investigated editing solutions and software; learned filmbox (now MotionBuilder); got mocap working in the game
- Planned and assisted with mocap shoots and editing – direction, poses, tech issues
- Directed and managed outsourcing of editing/looping process
- Designed and wrote automation tools
- Assisted with writing outsourcing contracts
- Sound event trigger system design and tool implementation
- Animation Table / State hierarchy work on character and creatures – esp. for player characters
- Mounts and Vehicles character animation systems
- Character customization
- Designed and prototyped character customization blend shape / wrap deformer / hueing systems
- Prototyped character customization UI; created random head generator
- Wearable occlusion / layer system
- Pivotal in design of wearables occlusion system, documented and taught team members, designed occlusion tools for artists
- Contributed to slot arrangement / slot blocking system
- LOD fairy / Cyborg factory
- Designed and prototyped system for automating rapid creation of customized wearables and their LODs using blend shapes / wrap deformers, additional automation including automatic assignment of weights to ring vertices
- Technical Art systems including: Skeletal LOD system, Hierarchical LOD system, Skeletal mesh hardpoint system including blend shape HPs
- Bug fixes – responsible for fixing bugs for almost every aspect of art in the game
- Production art including in-game intro animation, characters, droids, ships, architecture, lighting, particles and more