During my time at Neon Machine, I worked as a Character Technical Artist early on in its production of Shrapnel, a competitive, extraction-based first-person shooter built in Unreal Engine 5. I collaborated with the Character Lead and team to meet artistic and technical goals, managing and refining Metahuman-based assets, developing cloth simulation and character customization systems, and supporting R&D efforts.
Shrapnel was originally planned to be a crypto-based game, there were a lot of new things we had to learn as a studio. One of these things was how to work with NFTs and how to effectively market them. I found myself soon assisting UI/UX to render high-quality NFT weapon and character skins, in real-time presentations. I learned new ways how to render high-quality images and how to do it headless without opening Unreal Editor. Although, I was able not to finish this system, I was able to learn a lot about how to use Unreal Engine's rendering capabilities in new ways, and I was able to help the team understand how to use these tools effectively for their needs.
Shrapnel gave me valuable insight into game production, asset management, and team collaboration. I gained experience converting animated Nanite vehicles to skeletal meshes for performance, optimizing Metahuman assets, and an intro into using Unreal Insights for profiling. This project strengthened my weight painting, scripting, and cross-team problem-solving skills while deepening my understanding of scalable asset workflows for high-quality game production.
Responsible for all character skinning, character integration, some vheicle integration, cloth sims, renderings, and optimizations.
[Character Lead - Brice Broaddus] [Weapons Lead - Tanner Ellison] [Enviorment Lead - Sherif Habashi] [Hard Surface Artist, Enviorment Artist - Danny Rodriguez]
[Character Artists - Sergei Matveenkov, Pedro Varella, and Abraham Tovmasyan]