Taylor Smith Email & Phone Number

Birmingham, Alabama, United States

Birmingham, Alabama, United States

Led instruction for Ed Farm's Pathways Program, teaching both new developers and those with some experience how to build iOS apps with Swift. The course works through the basics of the Swift language and into UIKit as the course progresses. Created interactive course materials to illustrate the course curriculum in a different way than a traditional slide/demo style in an effort to engage the participants in new ways. Transitioned to online, video-based education in March 2020 in response to COVID-19.

Birmingham, Alabama Area

• Designed and developed the Better Than Yesterday iOS app over the course of two months with the goal of learning the development process for iOS. The timeline was tight, as the goal was to release the goal tracking app prior to the new year in hopes of reaching users that are looking for something to assist in keeping their New Year's Resolutions on track.• Utilized Core Data to manage the Goals and Checkins for the app, which provided an opportunity to learn about some of the more advanced features of the iOS API while being a natural fit for the data model.• Designed custom views to provide a unique look and feel to the app in various places, improving upon the base offerings from the iOS library.

Orange County, California Area

• Contributed lighting to much of WildStar, including dozens of interiors, large exterior spaces, and cinematics. • Created and adjusted sky and fog setups using proprietary tools to achieve the desired look and feel of the world of WildStar. • Used Softimage to adjust geometry for interiors to add vertex shading based occlusion.

Austin, Tx

• Lit numerous levels of Epic Mickey 2 for Wii, XBox 360, and PS3 platforms.• Dealt with numerous technical issues during the polish and bug fixing stages of production, primarily dealing with the limitations of vertex shading and lighting.• Investigated and developed techniques for the XBox 360 and PS3 lighting pipeline, including the process we used to directly port much of the lighting from the Wii version to the other consoles.• Contributed to early phases of effects art for the game, constructing placeholder effects to flesh out the game prior to polish.• Worked with materials, effects, lighting and Kismet in Unreal for various prototypes for future projects at Junction Point.

Lighting, Rendering, and Compositing for Blizzard CinematicsProjects:World of Warcraft: CataclysmStarCraft 2: Wings of LibertyWorld of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich KingStarCraft 2: Building a Better Marine Announcement Trailer• Developed and supported numerous tools using MEL for the Cinematics finishing team’s lighting and rendering work, including tools to handle repetitive Maya tasks for the Cinematics in-house batch management tool which required a blend of both Python and MEL• Developed a solution utilizing readily available RenderMan LightAdaptor nodes that allowed artists to rapidly switch between light sets visible in their renders• Constructed special purpose shaders for use in shots where needed and when production constraints limited the development of a shader upstream in the pipeline• Utilized my previous RenderMan experience and knowledge to support artists and supply solutions during the Cinematics transition from 3D Studio Max to Maya and RenderMan as the primary toolset in Spring 2007• Dissected a large, complex model with an extreme rendering memory footprint toenable lighting and rendering in pieces with successful post-render compositing

• Managed numerous shots at any one time, organizing render submissions to maintain high throughput while checking quality of renders prior to presentation to the director• Optimized shots through removal of offscreen geometry, greatly reducing pre-render calculation time, often by hours per frame• Managed several Picture-in-Picture shots, which required organization and handling of numerous small renders prior to using these pre-renders in the final output• Light composite fixing on shots in Shake where an issue could be managed more efficiently there than by having to send it to another department to handle the solution

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