Ben Blakemore Email & Phone Number

Winsford

I play a vital role in the ongoing maintenance and development of KASEMAKE, AG/CAD Limited’s flagship CAD software solution for packaging and sign-making professions used UK wide and internationally; working in a small team across four major software releases and countless minor releases. Evolution of the 2D CAD drawing tools and additional features such as the implementation of multipage drawings, algorithms to fix drawing integrity (removing element overlaps, closing gaps between elements, converting short line segments to arcs) and upgrading all the interfaces from Janus to DevExpress WinForms.Upgraded the native 3D views to DirectX 11, for the conversion of 2D drawings to interactive 3D foldable boxes. This also included advanced shader creation such as a parallax for visualising corrugated board and an ambient occlusion effect.Lead the creation of a standalone 3D application for the simulation of larger 3D environments (namely in3D). This product was built using a game engine called Unigine, with DevExpress WinForms components for the UI. Various 3D export formats were implemented using assimp, ray tracing with POV-Ray and animated movies via ffmpeg.Development of the job management and scheduling system using the DevExpress XPO ORM tool and utilising Expando objects technology. Users can save drawings in a job->file->page table hierarchy whilst having full UI controls to add, remove and customise all the fields of each table.Support for digital cutters utilising Euresys EasyMatch and OpenCV. Development included (but not limited to); automatic camera distortion correction, operation of the sheet feeder/unloader, plotting via QR barcodes and edge recognition for the alignment of roll media.Development of a 3D PDF exporter using itextsharp to embed PRC 3D files with javascript encoded interactive animations. A similar approach was also used to create WebGL exports.

Huddersfield, England, United Kingdom

This job was undertaken as part of my sandwich year studies at university. I created multiple prototype games in XNA C# for contractors such as the Royal Armouries museums, two of which featured in a pirate themed exhibition in the museum at Louisville, Kentucky.