Stephen Coan

Experience

 

 

Blizzard Entertainment

Technical Artist | June 2015 – Present

• Supported the Heroes of the Storm FX team by building tools and streamlining the FX content pipeline. Provided general support to tech designers and character/environment artists.

• Maintained deployment system for tools and code developed by Tech Art.

• Built and expanded tools for use by artists, tech designers, tech artists, and QA:

  • Data generation apps used by artists for rapid asset implementation in-game.

  • Art health app used by artists to identify sources of poor asset performance.

  • Build health app used by Tech Art and QA to identify the presence of invalid or sensitive content within a build.

• Restructured Heroes of the Storm's asset data to take advantage of scripting language features. Communicated between engineers & artists/designers to ensure editor stability during large-scale redevelopment of game data system.

• Contributed to centralized documentation of Tech Art tools on internal wiki.

• Expanded team's code library. Built and updated Python packages for interacting with game data, the 3dsMax API, source control, and build cleanup.

• Rigged characters & props for the Machines of War content release.

 

 

Studio Wildcard

Contract Technical Artist | April 2015 – June 2015

• Provided technical art support during late-stage development of Ark: Survival Evolved.

• Built and updated master materials for characters, foliage, and FX in Unreal 4.

• Developed and disseminated optimization techniques for SpeedTree to artists.

• Coordinated with outsource art team to ensure character and prop assets met performance and quality standards.

 

 

3D Live Events

Contract Technical Artist | Jan. 2015 – Feb. 2015

• Supervised technical art development for VR music video demoed at SXSW.

• Educated art team with cinematic rendering background on optimization techniques for real-time rendering.

• Optimized VFX and model assets for the unique challenges of a VR environment.

• Investigated technical challenges to development of interactive DJ visualization in Unreal. Prototyped audio-driven gameplay and proprietary stereoscopic rendering output on tight deadlines.

2010 - present

2010 - present