I’ve been involved since the early days in EA’s R&D related to integrating Houdini with their Frostbite Engine. I started working with Houdini professionally in 2006, as a Render TD in animated film. Later, on the Tiburon studio team at EA, I worked on the development of a Houdini head tool, which managed hundreds of player and coach head assets for the Madden Football 15 team. When I moved to BioWare, I got involved with EA’s internal Houdini R&D team, which was in the early stages of integrating Houdini with Frostbite.
For my Procedural Map Generator for Mass Effect: Andromeda, I needed to automate the pipeline of sending large amounts of geometry data from Frostbite to Houdini, processing it, and importing it back into Frostbite for use in game. I worked with programmers and other tech artists to implement a socket connection within Frostbite, using Frostbite’s FBScript internal scripting language (based on IronPython). It launched hython via a separate thread so that asset processing could continue without locking up the engine.
Using FBScript to manage the pipeline allowed me to create a user-friendly interface for the map generator within Frostbite. I set up hython to return logging data throughout its processing, which was displayed to the user on a progress bar. One of the challenges of working with hython is debugging errors as assets are processed, and real-time access to the hython logs was invaluable in allowing tech artists to pinpoint the places where the pipeline was failing.
2024 As the Character Materials lead for Dragon Age: Veilguard, I overhauled the skin treatment for characters to increase visual quality and to be more inclusive of all skintones. Originally skin only covered a range from pale peach to mid brown. The lighting team believed it was too difficult to
2016 I created the procedural map generator which was behind the blue holographic maps in Mass Effect Andromeda. The core functionality operated in Houdini, with a Frostbite wrapper and GUI to make it easier to export levels for map generation. There were two types of map: large outdoor areas composed
2024 I was responsible for character materials in Dragon Age: Veilguard. Our character creator was one of our headline features, and we wanted to give players as broad a range of inclusive options as we could. Throughout production, I advocated for players to have exposure to maximum customization options. Those
A few of the pipeline tools I’ve created. All tools and code on this page copyright © Electronic Arts. Madden 15 Houdini Head Tool Houdini with Python Madden Football, Tiburon, Electronic Arts, 2014 Madden 15 included significant improvements in the likeness of coaches and star players. Coaches and players were
2017 Lighting technology Mass Effect: Andromeda used the Enlighten lighting system, and I was the primary tech art contact for debugging artist issues related to Enlighten. For performance reasons, most of the game environment used Static Enlighten lighting bakes. Each game asset needed Enlighten geometry to be authored according to
Before I moved to game development in 2008, I worked as a Render TD and a Lighting and Compositing artist for feature film. Here are some example shots where I was responsible for sequence or shot lighting, and compositing. Kung Fu Panda Sequence lighting and compositing Open Season 2 Sequence
