Responsibilities• Lead new character technology initiatives• Directly contribute to the design of tools and pipelines• Establish key relationships with related external partnersKey Contributions• Built an industry first ML team specializing in the acquisition, generation and training of novel & synthetic data for character physique & deformation including cloth, anatomy & facial.• Spearheaded physically-based character pipeline, facilitating transition from linear-blend skinning to scanning, physical simulation, and machine-learning. • Established in-house facial pipeline, and facilitated expansion from traditional combinatorial shape-based approach to ML-based system based on 4d data.• Developed runtime inference nodes for Maya based on onnx runtime, allowing training in various ml frameworks. • Worked with various departments to stand-up offline processing framework for offline simulation and training. • Worked closely with core engine team to handle integration and development of new character technologies.• Contributed to the development of acquisition hardware.

• Oversee the Production & Character Technology goals for the Tech Anim team across active projects. • Directly Responsible for Hiring & Professional Development on the tech anim team. Key Contributions:• During this period, I led the development of the first fully physical and machine-learning based characters in an AAA Title (Miles Morales), where we built a highly anatomically accurate skeletal/muscular/skin system and simulated hundreds of hours of anatomy and primary costumes to generate training data for an ML-based deformation model that was run in real-time in the shipped title on PS5. The work on this title set the precedent for ML inference on character deformations in AAA games, showing it was both possible and performant on console, paving the path for developments such as the Unreal ML Deformer and others that followed suit. • Facilitated the transition of low-resolution skeletally based facial system on Ratchet & Clank to a more flexible and high fidelity morph-based system, used on all primary characters.

• Oversee the Production & Technology Development Goals for the Rigging Department Across all active projects• Responsible for all hiring and professional development• Responsible for staffing shows and working with my team of Rigging Leads & Supervisors to determine show-related production and technology needs• Provide on-site supervision of Actor Acquisitions for body and facial performance capture• Provide show-level supervision on specific projects when required• Co-develop and maintain a variety of facility-level character setup and pipeline tools• Develop and maintain FACS based facial system• Work directly on show assets and build prototypes utilizing any new techniques or technologySpecialties:• Specialized in physically based character assets, including flesh and muscle simulation and facs/muscle based facial rigging and shape sculpting.• Extensive experience across the range of character asset types, Squash & Stretch to Photoreal, Body & Face.

• Supervise teams of up to 15 artists on both CG Features & Live-Action VFX• Direct actors on set during facs (facial) & body scanning/acquisitions• Create body & face rigs for hero characters in VFX & Feature Animation.• Strong focus on physically based & FACS based rigging for VFX.• Develop or assist in development of numerous key tools and workflows to simplify or automate rigging process.• Author and maintain facility-level actor acquisition documents

• Creature Setup/Rigging• Cloth, Hair, Muscle, Flesh Sim Setup• Creature Shot Finaling and simulation

• Facial rigging lead on a variety of projects• Facial rigging/sculpting, consultation & support with emphasis on photoreal/vfx characters• Body rigging for a wide variety of characters, creatures and props spanning animated features and vfx• Emphasis on automating and streamlining workflow for complex character's and repetitive rigging tasks.• Co-develop, maintain and support key facial rigging toolsets• Contribute to maintenance and development of in-house tools, and various aspects of the rigging pipeline.

• Classroom instruction on character rigging techniques in Maya.

• instruct and assist in development of classes for computer animation majors.• develop new courses for body and facial rigging

iClips Network was a startup and early competitor in the online streaming world. They focused on directing and streaming live musical events, which included numerous large concerts and festivals. Their parallel endeavors focused on the creation original content in a variety of mediums. The interactive/gaming division was a boutique spin-off focused on developing gamified interactive worlds and characters to accompany the live streaming business. My role was to direct a team of artists and programmers in the creation of various networked virtual worlds and games, and contribute directly to pipeline and asset development. Among the projects, we created a combination of fully interactive worlds, characters, and creatures. These worlds were based on a mix of classic literature, fully original concepts, and recreations of real-world locations like the Smithsonian. One of our largest and most complete worlds was a full-scale (pre-street-view) replica of the French Quarter in New Orleans, created by photographing every building and digitally reconstructing the quarter block-for-block (exterior and interior) to real-world scale, with a large interactive venue centered around Jackson Square Park. We created interactive character customization tools that allowed users to engage in proportional, textural, and wardrobe customization of several unique characters, and had functional multi-player networking where dozens to hundreds of people could interact in the world while live events streamed into the environment.On-the-box contributions included a variety of character and environment modeling, rigging, texturing, lookdev, lighting, level design, pipeline tool development (model, rig, and animation publishing, autorigging, etc), and on-site photography for the French Quarter.

• character body and facial rigging• character modeling• animation

• 3D modeling and animation for motion graphics and product visualization• video editing• live videography

• Body & Facial Rigging.• Modeling for characters and motion graphics.• Video editing and videography.

Intern focused on computer-based graphics for print and web.