Mike Erwin Email and Phone Number

Gameplay-focused rendering on League of Legends. I just joined Riot so will update this when I settle in!

I’ve been working on Premo, DreamWorks’s in-house Animation & Rigging tool set. Performance profiling and optimization, updating OpenGL/GLSL to newer version, plus some UI work using Qt. A major project has been investigating load & save times of complex character rigs with layered overrides. All in service of production artists working on our feature films.Announced/released projects:- Puss in Boots the Last Wish- Ruby Gillman Teenage Kraken- Trolls Band Together- Kung Fu Panda 4

I started this company to level up artists' workflow between Blender and Unreal Engine.Our Brigge plugins directly import / export 3D mesh models and procedural materials. If you can *create* a visual asset in Blender and *use* it in Unreal, we wanted to make that process as easy as possible.I was also the main point of contact for domain experts and customers, going to events such as GDC, SIGGRAPH, and Blender Conference to talk with 3D artists and game devs. We applied these insights directly to our software development efforts.

At Epic I worked on UE4 editor, tools & 3D art pipeline. Introduced support for glTF, the 3D model format from Khronos, as an open alternative to FBX. Dug deep into Mac & Windows code for windowing / fullscreen / HiDPI. Got my first experience with build & deploy pipelines for Android, XBox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch, and made the process more reliable for game devs.

I'm still active in the Blender world, just not as a full-time developer.I was part of the small team that laid the foundations for Blender 2.8 and its real-time EEVEE viewport. My role was GPU & systems expert. Planned & led the transition to OpenGL 3.3 (from 2.1) so we could use advanced GPU features while not leaving users behind. Authored low-level GL/Vulkan support library that much of Blender is now based on. I've worked on efficient geometry submission, state tracking / batching & the shader-driven system that feeds on this geometry data.Worked to make OpenSubdiv robust on more systems -- Intel and AMD integrated graphics, Mac, and so on.Previously added support for 3Dconnexion's entire product line across Mac, Windows & Linux. What began as my Google Summer of Code project continued with support from 3Dconnexion. This was integrated into Blender’s 2.59 release, enabling 3D mouse users to smoothly navigate scenes and manipulate objects. I continue to add support for new hardware products as they come out.In 2012 I was invited to mentor another student's Summer of Code project (multitouch interaction). Being able to see both sides of the program and represent Blender at the mentor summit at Google HQ was a highlight of that year.Traveled to Amsterdam for the 2014 Blender Conference, finally meeting many of the people I had known only by their IRC handles! Returned in 2015, and gave a talks in 2016, 2017 and 2019.

Doing geometry with computers!

Floored builds immersive VR walkthroughs of architectural spaces. I supported the asset pipleline between our 3D modeling team and in-house WebGL rendering engine. Developed custom Blender tooling to manage mesh & material data, import & display point clouds, export optimized models.

Working hard to make sure your pixels end up in the right place, with the right colors in them!As a member of the Mac 3D team, worked closely with fellow engineers at both AMD and Apple on new and existing systems, most recently the dual-GPU Mac Pro. Implemented OpenGL 4.x features which shipped in OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Optimized GLSL code generation on our GPUs for up to 20% gains in several operations. Brought many combinations of vertex data types and alignments onto the fast path, both for GCN and some of our older cards.One of my favorite tasks was working with 3rd party developers to tune their games / applications and track down the trickiest bugs.

Explored effective rendering techniques for the dense flow fields produced by diffusion MRI machines. This project was half engineering (data analysis, interactive rendering, responsive UI) and half perceptive psychology (task performance, aesthetics). My work focused on the engineering side, using OpenGL to produce a variety of visual representations of brain scan data.

Worked primarily on Bomgar’s “rep client” used by enterprise tech support staff worldwide. Delved into the Qt framework and its own flavor of C++. Discovered and fixed a bug in Qt itself (16-bit BMP decoding on PowerPC). Updated communication protocol to support new product features and learned just enough PHP to expose these updates via our web-based admin interface. Pushed Mac targets toward modern tech and idioms. Added sleep/wake, login/logout and screen-geometry-change awareness to Mac targets. Significantly reduced overdraw in a much-used part of the rep client, leading to a more responsive interface.

Led early development of a simulation project, with a dozen developers and 25,000+ lines of code. Our simulation domain was the mass evacuation of sports arenas. We used the GNU toolchain to develop on and target Linux and Windows. In addition to our custom code (mostly C++), we leveraged OpenGL, SDL, various imaging libraries, ODE for physics, and Lua for scripting.On this project I specialized in 3D graphics, performance, file formats, and user interaction. Wrote importers for geometry data in Collada, OBJ and custom formats. Created visual validation tools for incoming models. Rewrote core graphics engine to handle huge data sets, then tuned for 9-fold performance boost, making larger simulations feasible on modest hardware. Later worked on scalable AI for crowd dynamics (thousands of agents) using the best ideas prototyped by myself and others over the previous two years.

Created and extended in-house software to support atmospheric physics team. Much of this work pivoted around data capture, storage, display and analysis. Early work involved systems-level access to a high-speed data capture card, exposing the complexities of the device via a humane interface. Later designed and implemented cross-platform plug-in framework for hyper-spectral image filtering, also prototyping user interaction design for main application. Finally worked with high dynamic range imaging, using both libpng and OpenEXR. The elegance of the PNG format struck me, leading to later independent development of PNG-based tools.

Began original research on programming languages & human factors that led to two grand prizes at USM's Innovative Design for Computing competition, 2005 (hcf/3000 programming system) and 2006 (humane assembly language tools for the 68000). Funded by NASA Space Grant.