Having taught Maya and other 3D software for over ten years in many disciplines, including lighting, texture painting, UV unwrapping, look development (film and real-time), render optimization, rigging, and compositing, I am a well-rounded veteran capable of wearing many hats.I was Technical Director on MediaWorks, a project-based class in which students work with real-world clients, such as Corning, TED, and Rebus Farm, to generate promotional media. I’ve also created rigs allowing seamless blending between motion-captured data and custom animation for iPhone apps.Throughout my teaching career, I’ve also been involved in a project-based class, “Project X,” in which talented students and industry experts collaborate to produce award-winning animated short films. We’d take an idea and turn it into a polished animated film in about 18 months. I became very familiar with the pipeline and often needed to work with technical artists to solve problems, create tools to improve efficiency, and facilitate communication between different teams. From 2017 until the completion of the most recent film this year, the fifth one I’d worked on, I was Director of the Project X.Some notable tools I’ve created include a shader conversion utility that converts common Maya shader types between one another while keeping all texture connection and applicable settings, a particle-based rain system that dynamically generates procedural ripples at points of impact on the ground, auto-comp scripts for Nuke and Fusion in Python and Lua, respectively, and a custom convolution filter in Fusion using the Symmetrical Nearest Neighbor system.I was chosen to participate in the Siggraph 2017 VR Film Jam held by Epic Games. Assets from an animated short I'd worked on needed to be heavily optimized in order to maintain a constant 90 frames per second. I led the team and streamlined models and textures with little to no quality loss. Our finished product was showcased in VR Village.