About
Wesley P Eldridge (WizTheRed) is a Las Vegas based technical artist with an emphasis on Shaders, 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.
Skills & Abilities
Planning and building tools, pipelines, and visual effects that a beautiful, performant, and playable.
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++.
DEVELOPMENT
System, Tool, Material (Shader), and VFX development (Cascade and Niagara), 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 (UE4, UE5) and Unity
3D Software | Houdini, ZBrush, 3DS Max
2D Software| Photoshop, Substance Suite, Quixel Mixer / Bridge, Divinci Resolve
Other Software | RenderDoc, 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 providing guided art and technical direction while collaborating with artists / teams
Experience
SENIOR TECHNICAL ARTIST | Singularity 6 | 2022 - 2024
Shipped Palia on PC, Steam, and Switch
Create a robust, artist-friendly, performant shader stack for Cosmetics and characters in a stylized PBR live service game.
Work directly with Team Leadership, Concept artists, Character Artists, FX Artists, and Technical Animators to establish and push the quality bar for FX and shader fidelity. Also helped establish the “What If” idea space in early cosmetics planning to maximize player impact and product value.
Proposed an alternative method of leveraging our shader stack and tools to significantly de-scope and de-risk a new product vertical significantly improving the overall ROI for the feature.
Help establish performance budgets and asset authoring standards with Character Lead and Technical Animation teams.
Improved Environment and VFX shader performance and fidelity.
Extensive work related to performance optimizations for characters and environments to ship on Switch.
Work in a semi-autonomous manner to balance task load, supporting other teams, and doing feature RND to make sure we are ahead of the curve on feature development and tech-debt.
Wrote a variety of tools to validate PBR, lighting environment, and streamline asset generation.
Mentor other character artists and tech artists about Shaders and shader best practices, modeling techniques, environment / HLOD optimization, and Blueprint best practices / code reviews.
Wrote C++ plugins for use in Cosmetics for implementing material WPO springs and other pop-in effects in a performant manner.
Support Lighting needs and post process refactors before a dedicated lighting artist was hired.
Lead Technical Artist| Hardsuit Labs | 2019 - 2022
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