My Story

My Story In the late `80's I worked on military simulators for DARPA, The program was called SIMNET , the first real-time multi-user vehicle simulator: tanks, helicopters and airplanes in a virtual battlefield.

I moved on to become a production manager at Microsoft, creating encyclopedia CD's which led to a transfer to the Sports group where I managed the production of baseball and basketball encyclopedia CD's. The Sports Group evolved into the Sports Games Group. I became 3D Art Lead for four sports games. My duties included editing motion capture, building and texturing stadiums, creating 256 color palettes, and scheduling production. I was instrumental in creating, training, and developing a productive and fun team.

After Microsoft Sports, I headed to Cavedog. I had a chance to get creative by making a race (Veruna) for Total Annihilation Kingdoms. I was designing, modeling and animating. When Cavedog closed I transferred to Humongous Entertainment. I worked on Backyard Soccer, Backyard Basketball, and created a faction for MoonBase.

At EA I worked on Need for Speed, Hot Pursuit 2. I created a dam, a covered bridge, western town and helped with the mediterranean town and smaller sites.

Back at Microsoft, I worked on my first MMPG, Mythica. I managed the production of the creature team and did lots of rigging and weighting of amazing creatures and humans. My modeling included birds, monsters and weapons. I was a go-between with the programmers, artists and designers. I fixed the frame rate bug in the game the day before E3. I was able to take the frame rate from 5 up to 60.

I did production management at Gas Powered Games. I scheduling and assigning work for Supreme Commander. With the help of a programmer, I designed and created a webpage Wikipedia of the project. Browsing the available models became simple and updates were automatic on a nightly basis.

At FASA I was brought on to do technical animation – specifically, setting transitions between animations. I also created the ragdoll models. I learned the interface and the output parameters of Havok and after much testing (characters dying and getting stuck in strange places) I achieved a very realistic ragdoll model for each of the body types in ShadowRun.

On The Agency (Sony) I joined a team I knew and liked.I became the guy to fix problems. I worked in the Character group and created a solid pipeline. I then moved to run the weapons group. I was able to fix their pipeline and get new weapons flowing into the game. I also created a full set of ragdolls for the game.

I joined a start-up game company, Motiga. The hope was to do 3D mobile games. I worked with normal and specular maps to help fill data and created a high res human character and rigged him for animation. With our limited resources, we never got to produce a game, but built a lot of different concepts.

I worked as an instructor at AIE college. I learned a lot teaching what I knew from the industry to eager students. It also taught me that I don't like lecturing every day to 40 students.

Since then I've done a variety of contract and freelance work. As you can see I have a long and varied work history. I can overcome disaster, manage game production, model and troubleshoot. I've scheduled art in games and created pipelines. I've created concepts and been a technical artist. I've taught and trained interns and developed an evolving a team The breadth and depth of my experience speaks for itself, but most of all, I enjoy being an artist and working with a team to created games.