Ubisoft Reflections | Sep 2022 - Present

Technical Artist | Apr 2024

Developing and optimising procedural tooling and content for an unannounced AAA project.

• Designed a Houdini procedural tool that lets artists author complex natural spaces from in-editor parameters, cutting asset iteration from hours to minutes.
• Owned an automated performance test for procedurally placed vegetation, giving the tech art team a continuous stream of data to assess the performance impact of changes at a glance.
• Shipped the project's Python tooling into a central repository with automated build and deployment, reducing risk in distribution to artists and freeing up developer time.
• Designed a texture-to-shader workflow for urban assets, packing data efficiently into textures and vertex colours to deliver visually rich, per-instance variation at low runtime cost.

Junior Technical Artist | Sep 2022

Developing DCC Tools and Shaders for an unannounced AAA project.

• Extended in-house asset-exporters, auto-riggers and validators with MAXScript to support new asset categories.
• Worked closely with vehicle art team to ship a headlight shader using parallax and emission that reads correctly in both day and night lighting.
• Stabilised an advanced character clothing shader inherited from another internal project. Fixed a backlog of rendering bugs, refactored the implementation and wrote artist-facing documentation.

UNESCO City of Design Dundee | Aug - Oct 2021

Games Development Intern

Shipped an educational videogame for UNESCO City of Design's bi-annual Dundee Design Festival under the production of Agency of None titled Dark Patterns: Unashamed. All aspects of the game were created by myself aside from the art assets that Agency of None designed.

Python

File management, asset validation, CI/CD automation, and artist-facing UI built with PyQt/PySide.

• Shipped the project's Python tooling into a centralised internal package system with automated build and deployment, reducing distribution risk and freeing up developer time.

C++

Editor debugging, custom node authoring, and OpenGL renderer work.

• Debugging complex engine code and in Houdini to Engine pipelines
• Shipped modifier that allows artists to set parameters for Houdini procedural pipelines in-editor.

C#

Automated testing tooling and Unity programming — see Dark Patterns for a shipped example.

• Automated performance test tool for procedurally placed vegetation.

Houdini

HDA authoring with Houdini Engine for in-editor pipelines.

• Designed a procedural tool that lets artists author complex natural environments directly from in-editor parameters, cutting asset iteration from hours to minutes.

3ds Max & Maya

Python and MAXScript tooling across both DCCs, deployed through an internal package system

• Extended in-house asset-exporters, auto-riggers and validators with MAXScript to support new asset categories

Substance Painter & Designer

Designing presets for asset-types, integrating tooling and updating shaders.

• Implemented shader in Substance Designer to accurately reflect in-engine shaders.
• Designed texture presets to streamline texture generation for bespoke shaders.

Proprietary Engine (Ubisoft)

Editor debugging in C++, custom node graph authoring, shaders, automated data management, procedural integration.

Unreal Engine 5

Shader and pipeline work: Material Graph, HLSL custom expressions, Niagara VFX.

Unity

C# gameplay programming. See Dark Patterns for a shipped Unity project.

Abertay University | Sep 2021 - Sep 2022

MProf in Games Development with Distinction

Students develop core skills through applied project work, supported by experienced games industry practitioners.

The Glasgow School of Art | Sep 2017 - May 2021

First Class BA(Hons) in Interaction Design

Combines technology with visual thinking and creative problem-solving. Students learn to work with creative code to generate engaging interactive digital media for a wide range of platforms.

Abertay University | Nov 2022

University Prize (Highest GPA)

"Awarded to the best postgraduate student who achieves a high level of performance generally and is deemed to be the best student overall"