EXPERIENCE

Contract

05/2024 - 01/2025

Constructed and maintained a set of procedural environment generation tools in Unreal Engine 5, including tools for road and building placement and tools for foliage and asset layout.

Built a custom, layer-based landscape auto-material for Unreal Engine 5 with support for in-engine mask generation, procedural tri-planar projection, and creation of a dynamically generated, tile based landscape proxy system to allow for higher quality vertex displacement.
Built a graphical material manager plugin for Houdini to allow artists to search and browse a large texture set library and import sets automatically into Solaris as render-ready materials.
Built a set of tools to convert large sets of Xfrog foliage assets to native USD assets with instance systems to replace geometric leaves and procedurally generated variants and also to load those assets with the ability to modify leaf systems and materials and automatically generate foliage instance systems.
Set up and managed Helix Core version control for the CG team.

Contract

07/2023 - 05/2024

Build an automatic simulation playblast tool to allow CFX artists to more easily prepare their work for review.
Created and maintained the studio’s custom Houdini CFX toolset and maintained all associated Python libraries.
Assisted in the creation of studio documentation and onboarding data.
Created a set of node graph “blueprint” tools which allowed artists to serialize node graphs to JSON files and rebuild the graph from those files. It also allowed artists to diff blueprint files and propagate changes to other blueprints.
Built a set of asset publishing tools to conform artist data to pipeline standards and to package that data for delivery to clients.

Senior Pipeline TD

07/2022 - 07/2023

Created and maintained tools and scripts for the studio to help with automating tasks and reducing inefficiencies in production across various departments.
Liaised with heads of various departments to assist them in identifying and correcting pain points and inefficiencies.
Assisted in the creation of studio-wide standardization practices for data management.
Created a number of tools across multiple DCCs to facilitate efficient review processes for artists from various departments.
Created and maintained a standardized Houdini toolset to allow for rapid local and remote deployment of proprietary tools.

Lead Cloth FX Artist

06/2021 - 07/2022

Created and maintained numerous Carbon cloth rigs ranging from skin-tight suits to flowing dresses, each with 24 separate, stable size variants, meant to run on various animations.
Assisted the Cloth FX Supervisor in the onboarding and training of new artists, and created and maintained a Slack channel dedicated to training new Cloth FX artists.
Supervised Cloth FX team during times when the Cloth FX Supervisor was out of the office.
Worked directly with the team at Numerion Software to help identify bugs and test new features in Carbon Cloth for both Maya and Houdini.
Ingested and simulated various hair assets from other DCCs in Houdini using Vellum and created a set of Houdini HDAs used to generate and simulate hair and fur guides using a full-resolution, polygon-based hair asset as input.

Houdini TD/ Generalist

10/2020 - 01/2021

Modeled and textured numerous assets and large scale environments including various hero assets featured in a number of shots.
Created various automation tools to assist the small VFX team in working more efficiently.
Assisted in the creation of a number of varied VFX assets including various particle and pyro simulations.
Assisted in the creation of new workflows to clean and process volume-capture data for use with Houdini and Octane.

Generalist/ Pipeline TD

01/2019 - PRESENT

Worked directly with various studios to develop complex and varying VFX assets.
Participated in the creation of content and advertising material for large companies including Dell, Inc., ABC, MasterCard and Dish Network.
Assisted in coordinating and managing data pipelines for various teams across many projects.
Developed numerous pipeline and production tools to help ensure projects run smoothly and inefficiencies are eliminated.
Assisted in optimization of render pipelines utilizing various production render engines and farm-based solutions.