Wesley P Eldridge | Technical Artist

About

 

About

Wesley P Eldridge (WizTheRed) is a Seattle based technical artist with an emphasis on materials, VFX, and tools development in Unreal, excitedly exploring the cutting edge of game development, interactive storytelling, trans-media, and gorilla game development. A multi-disciplinarian with extensive experience working with PC, console, VR / AR, and mobile platforms. Originally from Arizona, he’s currently spending his days on the rocky shores of the Pacific Northwest.

 

Skills & Abilities

Planning and building systems, tools, pipelines, and visual effects that are beautiful, performant, and playable.

Bridge the gap between art, design, and engineering departments.

Rapidly Prototype systems, tools, and VFX to quickly evaluate ideas, then iterating on them until they are ready for prime time.

Extensive Unreal experience developing in both Blueprint and C++ environments

DEVELOPMENT

System, Tool, Material, and VFX development (Cascade and Niagara), Art Direction, PBR based deferred and forward rendering, Organic and Hard Surface Modeling, Scene Lighting and baking, Raytracing setup and performance tradeoffs, Core Animation, Illustration, and Design principles

Software

Engines | Unreal Engine and Unity

3D Software | Houdini, ZBrush, 3DS Max

2D Software| Photoshop, Substance Suite, Quixel Mixer / Bridge, Divinci Resolve

Other Software | Jira, Perforce, Confluence, Visual Studio, Office

Scripting

C++, C#, Python, Houdini VEX, Visual Scripting (Blueprints, Substance, Houdini)

LEADERSHIP

Has held a leadership position directing small teams and direct reports on multiple projects.

Enjoys mentoring and excels at teaching concepts and competencies to developers and stakeholders

Experience

Lead Technical Artist| Hardsuit Labs | 2019 - Present

Fortnite | Co-Development with Epic Games

  • Create reactive / dynamic material functions for Fortnite skins to closely match stylistic and IP considerations.

Chivalry 2 | Co-Development with Torn Banner and Tripwire Interactive

  • Evaluate established shaders, content library, and levels for Raytracing viability

  • Create drop in material functions, content examples, and work estimates for implementing Raytracing across the project

Vampire The Masquerade : Bloodlines 2

Additional responsibilities to those listed below

  • Took leadership role with the Technical Art and VFX departments. Also managed VFX Outsource.

  • Managed 3 direct reports with a focus on mentorship and technical skill development.

  • Collaborated with Tech-Design and Engineering to define a Blueprint coding and review standard for the entire studio across multiple projects.

  • Responsible for working with production to schedule sprints and milestone deliveries

Technical Artist | Hardsuit Labs | 2017 - 2019
Vampire the MASQUERADE : Bloodlines 2

  • Find interesting solutions to technical and visual problems.

  • Bridge the gap between art, design, and engineering departments.

  • Developed VFX and post process effects with a focus on performance and maintaining framerates under challenging hardware limitations.

  • Create and maintain the character, environment, and VFX shader libraries for the entire project.

  • Establish memory and frame-time budgets with Environment, Character, and VFX Departments.

  • Built an Unreal Editor tools framework using UMG and Editor Utility Widgets with a focus on unifying the developer experience across disciplines and facilitating the rapid prototyping and delivery of tools asks.

  • Built a wide variety of tools upon this framework. Examples include asset zoo generation, level voxelization and volume texture generation for dynamic weather, GPU based Christmas lights and location generation on meshes, PBR compliance viewer, bulk auditing tools and editing of large data sets such as conforming all static meshes to pre-defined LOD and collision standards.

  • Created a variety of dynamic and/or interactive systems including breakable glass, dynamic rain, destructible props and vehicles, blood and gore, etc.

  • Produced Houdini to Unreal pipelines for creating VFX source art.

Game Art Mercenary | Independent Contractor| 2009- 2017

Created production art, animation, materials, and tools for a variety of small studios and independent clients.

CLIENTS INCLUDE

  • Tomorrow Today Labs

  • Strong Suit Games

  • Stumbling Cat

  • OssOVR

  • BendVR

Education

The Art Institute of Phoenix | 2006

Bachelor of Arts Degree

Portfolio Access available upon request