I handle and create a wide variety of content as well as touch a lot of systems along the pipeline on a daily basis; so to capture my entire workload and then try to convey that here is a pretty big undertaking especially without coming off boring or repetitive. However, I will try! Nonetheless, here you will find examples of media, or snippets rather, of what I'm capable of and have done throughout my career. All assets pictured below have been used in game titles that have shipped as a final product, as an on-going live product, or as a publicly released/teased product. Any media from an unreleased/unannounced product will not be shown. For non-final forms of my work, you can view my Blog.
Enjoy!
ProbablyMonsters
-Overview & Responsibilities-
After my time on Prophecy, I joined a small incubation team that was building a new IP from scratch as a studio under the ProbablyMonsters umbrella. They were looking for a well rounded tech artist to come in and help across many systems and wear many hats that they knew could do good IC work but also support as a Lead when the time came. Fast forward 4 years later and we took that 5 person team to 60+ people and met all of our goals of incubation, prototype, and pre-production. I was Lead of 4 other tech artists in both engine tech art, tools tech art, and tech animation. Unfortunately, that game was also pulled before the public got to see it, so I am more than happy to talk about my time on that project and all the cool tech we did in Unreal Engine 4 and 5 but unfortunately I can't show it! (I am going to build out a password protected part of my website and try to get approval for screenshots to put there as well).
My duties on this team from incubation to the start of pre-production included prototyping many features such as ziplining, mantling, carrying explosive barrels, climbing ladders, destruction, to building stubs for vfx that showed synergies of abilities, to in world UI health bars and stats, stubbed anims, starter rigs, building out an in engine character pipeline that supported locomotion and abilities for our bespoke character kits, in engine validation tools, character previewer tools, setting up a 3D pre-match lobby, being a people manager and so much more!Prophecy
-Overview & Responsibilities-
After my short stint on the strike team that was working on Rogue Company, I switched to working on Prophecy as the sole tech artist so I juggled a lot of tasks. The major ones being supporting design in creating new units and handling feature requests that impacted the art team. The rest of my workload was still the same as my usual engine side duties as previous titles. Setting up and maintaining the characters animation systems or creating new systems that require a marriage of art and code like ability timings. Helping the environment team getting their art to look good. Or just doing cutscene work for the dragon boss fly in or the dice roll to name a few. This game was only live for a short time before being pulled down, so the images below are from the actual game that was forward facing to the public, but I am more than happy to talk more about the dev side of things.
Realm Royale
-Overview & Responsibilities-
After Paladins and the Paladins Battlegrounds prototype, I moved on over to Realm Royale as the sole Tech Artist where I was in charge of setting up and maintaining the characters animation systems for base locomotion, weapons, and abilities. Authoring the master material for characters, weapons, mounts, and chickens. Skin setup and config. Lobby presentation. And the usual, working with designers and programmers to create systems such as weapon swapping that loaded and unloaded weapon sets or turning into chickens!Paladins: Champions of the Realm
-Overview & Responsibilities-
Switching gears from working on Tower Defense games, I was picked up by Hi-Rez to work on their upcoming objective-based first-person team shooter called Paladins. Once again my roles as a Technical Artist switched, but nothing I wasn't used to. I dove right in taking care of their champion lineup as an engine side animation Tech Artist. My duties include: Importing animations, doing meta data, setting up both the 1st person and 3rd person character/weapon trees as well as the lobby presentation and maintaining them, working with the programmers to create the tech needed for the Champion's kits, database setup and maintenance for all the skins we put out, content management, stubbing out packages, system management, troubleshooting, the occasional material work, and documentation.
Dungeon Defenders 2:
-Overview & Responsibilities-
After DDE, I was picked up by the team working on DD2 and my roles shifted. They had more manpower therefore I was able to focus in on specific tasks (mainly in the Animation Department). I immediately spun up on getting their pipelines up and running to support features the designers wanted. Such as a pet system, a costume system, and even flushed out their weapon system. My duties included:
Rigging, simulating, animating, content management, system management, implementation & setup, troubleshooting, and documentation. Over a 14 month period.
Dungeon Defenders Eternity:
-Overview & Responsibilities-
After transitioning from Monster Madness Online I began work on DDE, still holding the position of Tech Artist. The studio was still a small team, so I had to continue to wear multiple hats on a project that had a ton of legacy content! Getting all the DD1 content up to date was a major priority. My duties roughly stayed the same as they did on my previous title with some areas garnering more focus due to the increase in content creation we undertook:
Rigging, animating, colorization, collision setup, material creation, content management, implementation, optimization, troubleshooting, rendering & converting UI iconography, and even modeling & texturing. Over a 10 month period.
Monster Madness Online:
-Overview & Responsibilities-
I was brought on as a Technical Artist for this title. The studio only had 17 people on site, so I had to wear multiple hats (which is what I love)! My duties included:
Rigging, animating, colorization, collision setup, material creation, content management, implementation, optimization, troubleshooting, rendering & converting UI iconography, and even modeling & texturing. Over a 4 month period.
Blank:
-Overview & Responsibilities-
Blank was our thesis project, if you will, to graduate. I worked with 12 other students from different departments of the university to bring Blank to life. Everything was created from scratch (engine, renderer, etc.)! I was chosen to be the Art Lead of the game. My Artistic duties included:
Rigging, animating, modeling, texturing, VFX, 2D asset creation for HUD and menu, implemented assets, lighting, level blockout, and prop placement.
My Leading duties included:
Assisted in creating the Art Team’s Asset List, created the Art Team’s Milestone Acceptance criteria document every month (which defined what the artist would create during that month’s sprint), implemented and managed the folder structure of our source control for the artist, created and assigned a Task List to each artist every month, managed the artist’s deadlines and checked off on the assets they created to make sure they were of quality and cohesiveness, met regularly with the Tech Lead to make sure integration of art was going smoothly, met regularly with the Art Director to make sure the vision was being achieved, and finally maintained workflow and troubleshot problems.
Regretablyy, my school computer died on me a while back and the only media I was able to salvage was Blank's main rig. Check out my Games section though, there you can go to Blank's website to see way more content and even play the game!
