Mike Pickton

Background

About Mike Pickton

Technical Arti Director for game development. My background is in shaders, environment art and asset pipeline. I believe Tech Art plays a critical role in empowering artist workflows and innovating in performant, high-quality visuals by coordinating the efforts of art and engineering teams.SKILLSSupportive leader - Managed high-performing team of 2-10 technical artists for more than 5 years. I focus on positive encouragement and stretching my team to ensure they are challenged and happy.Effective communicator - Facilitated cross-discipline/cross-studio communication and planning for large projects. I push for communication to be clear, structured and consistent.Holistic knowledge - Strong knowledge in several areas (rendering, tools, engine, art authoring, art direction) allows me to anticipate challenges to deliver holistic solutions.Compulsive mentor - 3 years university teaching and industry leadership experience has coupled with my compulsive drive to improve the knowledge and productivity of everyone around me.Positive attitude - I love my work, and enjoy fostering positive relationships.Quality-driven - A meticulous worker, I have a critical eye for visuals, and push for quality, maintainable code in my own work and that of my team.SOFTWARE / LANGUAGES3ds Max - 10+ years asset pipeline experience. Maxscript and python developer, having overseen major pipeline creations/overhauls to deliver empowering rapid-iteration toolsets.Photoshop - 10+ years texturing and photo editing. Experience scripting over COM with python.Procedural, Houdini - Heavily involved in planning a procedural worldbuilding toolset ans building tool and overseeing their implementation, with some hands-on time with Houdini.ZBrush, Maya, Substance, Marmoset - hobbyist experience, not using daily.Proprietary engines - 10+ years working with proprietary engines at Ubisoft and Playground GamesUnreal Engine - Hobbyist experience with materials, scene composition, blueprints, lighting, cascade.Shaders, HLSL - 10+ years in shader development. I am most experienced in node-based shader editors. Python - 10+ years developing standalone and integrated python tools and pipelines.C#, VBA - infrequent usage.DevOps, Jira, Confluence, MS Office - 10+ years as a power user, pushing the team to get most from these tools. Advocate for pivot tables!Perforce - 10+ years as a power user. I have developed custom tools and used the python API.