Turn 10 Studios / Microsoft Corp
Technical Art Director | FX Art Director
2023-2025
Support live service with monthly releases of game content.
Support AI initiatives to create generated content within license constraints to speed up content creation across art teams.
Lead initiatives across art teams to increase efficiency and speed up level creation process.
Collaborate with the other Art Directors, engineering and discipline leads to assess workflows and strategize for technical needs to execute desired in-game visuals.
Manage FX, and Tech Art teams, mentoring team members and modernizing techniques where appropriate.
Monolith Productions / WB Games
Technical Art Director | FX Art Director | Art Manager
2021-2023
Collaborate with the Director of Art to assess and strategize for technical needs to execute desired visuals elements of the game.
Give art direction as required to produce visuals in line with the overall direction of the game.
Lead teams in identifying and prototyping new technology to increase art workflow efficiency and unlock new creative technologies.
Partner with other discipline leads to define expectations between tech art, art, and engineering.
Manage Tech Art and FX Teams, staffing and mentoring when appropriate. Determine long-term needs and direction needs while supporting overall development for the technical needs of game development.
Supported technical animation (rigging, skinning, simulation), performance, lighting, visual effects, procedural world construction, and general DCC tools creation.
Monolith Productions / WB Games
Art Lead, FX
2015-2021
Worked across all disciplines to design, prototye and implement effects needs across the game.
In Conjunction with Art Director and Creative Director helped designed and implemented visual and aesthetic language for effects for all aspects of the game.
Led team of FX Artists for through various production stages to complete Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, sequel to Middle-Earth: Shadow or Mordor.
343 Industries / Microsoft Corporation
Senior FX Artist / Cinematics FX Lead
2011-2015
Design and Creation of photorealistic atmostpheric, energy, destruction and
general environmental effects in a real-time engine for Halo4.
Technology adaptation from offline rendering, simulation,
lighting and shading standards from film techniques into a real-time game engine.
Design and Scoping of highest quality performant effects for cinematic sequences in
game.Design and Creation of generic effect libraries to be used as hero effects
thoughout the engine.
Industrial Light and Magic
Lead Effects and Lighting Technical Director, Sequence Supervisor
2009-2011
Setup and simplification of complex effects for use by artists with varying skill sets.
Design and Creation of widespread generics and hero effects.
Supervision Responsibilities for look of digital assets in shots in regards
to lighting, scene integration and effects.
Industrial Light and Magic
Effects and Lighting Technical Director
2003-2009
Lighting, compositing, and software development for CG elements of shots.
Simulation, lighting and compositing as required for the creation of photorealistic
effects and creatures.
Lighting techniques included image based lighting, traditional lighting techniques
as well as raytracing where appropriate for various creatures and effects.
Simulation techniques included PLS and SPH for water splashes and oceans,
GPU based simulations for shallow water surfaces and fire, PhysBAM based smoke for
smoke, volumetric fire and dust, and standard physics based particle rules for debris,
dust and other minor effects.
Shader writing of custom RenderMan shaders for rendering procedurally created
geometry as well as for hair, including creating cheap methods for rendering large groups
of completely hairy creatures.
Industrial Light and Magic
Pipeline Research and Development Engineer
2001-2003
Evaluated and redesigned generic shader set for RenderMan, mental ray, and
ILM's proprietary renderer.
Responsible for the re-design of the rendering pipeline towards an
internal solution with the ability to
easily integrate any vendor software.
Designed and implemented a batch rendering / compositing system, scheduler,
and appropriate monitoring tools, and programming interfaces.
Ported applications / scripts to the Linux, OSF1, and OSX platforms from IRIX.
Designed and implemented cross-platform software control and
distribution system to manage and use arbitrary numbers of internal and
external software across multiple operating systems.
Industrial Light and Magic
Production Software Engineer
2000-2001
Developer and support role for internal and external software.
Created interfaces for batch rendering tools to handle logic of processes
before rendering and after composites were done.
Created and maintained converter utilities between various 3D file formats. (Softimage,
Maya, Discreet and others)
Developed and maintained internal graphics software for daily use in site-wide
film productions.
Supported community of computer graphics artists of varying disciplines (rotoscope, technical
directing, animation, viewpainting) and of varying technical ability.
Industrial Light and Magic
Technical Digital Resource Assistant
1999-2000
Redesigned resource management tools to better interact with
asset tracking system and with emphasis on automation.
Designed and implemented tool set for use for tracking and managing
digital resources including shot allocation, thousands of individual frames.