principal technical artist
Python (standalone/Max/Maya/Houdini)
Houdini SOPs, COPs, VEX & PDG
Mentoring Colleagues
MAXscript
Creating & Maintaining 3D Asset Pipelines
Shaders (HLSL & node-based editors)
Optimisation for real-time games
Experience with proprietary & out the box engines (Warscape/UE4/Unity)
Renderdoc
C#
I’m Aoife Glover (pronounced ee-fa!), and I’m a Principal Technical Artist at Creative Assembly, currently working on unannounced projects in the Total War franchise.
I’ve previously worked on Total War Warhammer III for most of it’s development cycle, alongside some work on Warhammer II DLC & Three Kingdoms DLC.
I’ve got an extensive working knowledge of Python (standalone & Max/Maya), Houdini & MAXscript for use in production tools and pipelines, alongside creation and look development of optimised shaders for real-time game engines, and the optimisation of game content.
I additionally have a small amount of experience in console development, and over the last year, I’ve been adding C# tool development to my skillset.
timeline
Creative Assembly
principal technical artist
October ‘23 to present
Continued work on a building optimisation pipeline, helped establish optimisation guidelines for environment art.
Translating of artist requests to tangible tech art tasks.
Porting & refactoring Python code to Python 3, upgrading pipelines to remove bloat and to improve UX.
Researching shader techniques to allow for better instancing of art content.
Researched interesting ways to generate large volumes of terrain in Houdini PDG, with artist controls. Many thousands assets worth of data contained within a couple hundred megabytes.
Helping organise the workload and backlog of the technical art team.
Chairing of meetings for stakeholders for TA work for the project.
Started work on a proxy LOD generator for buildings, using Houdini SOPs/COPs.
Continued support for colleagues, technical assistance for Python, Houdini & Shaders.
Continued post launch support for Warhammer III.
senior technical artist
April ‘22 to September ‘23
Joined pre-production of unannounced projects.
Established technical standards for TA Houdini work, so our HDA library feels consistent.
Worked on custom HDAs for our in-house terrain editor (heightfield processing, set dressing), using Houdini Engine. Regular meetings with the SideFX team to ensure our Houdini work is optimised and using the current features.
Helped with the hiring, training and onboarding of two trainee technical artists, and a senior technical artist over 18 months.
Implemented a fracturing tool (using Houdini SOPs) to create dynamic building destruction, with minimal input, catered to the needs of design, and also remaining performant.
Main contact for the TA department on my main assigned project, reporting progress, blockers & planned work to both the Art & Technical Art directors.
Started work on a pipeline to optimise buildings assembled out of kit pieces, including implementing the fracturing tool into this, using Houdini PDG, with a C# front end for UI & data entry.
Post launch support for Warhammer III (bugfixes, Immortal Empires, shader content, optimisation).
technical artist
April ‘21 to March ‘22
Used Houdini to create imposter LODs for characters, and bake vertex animation, working inside 3dsMax using Houdini Engine.
Worked to move much of our 3dsMax codebase from MAXscript to Python, with Python 3 compatibility.
Worked with GFX and code teams to help with optimisation effort on Warhammer III.
Updated coding standards for Python to match our best practices and needs.
Helped with the onboarding of a junior technical artist.
Shipped DLCs for Warhammer II (bug-fixes & shader content):
The Silence & The Fury
Shipped Total War: Warhammer III! :)
Some environment shader highlights from my time on Warhammer III:
A lava shader with parallax, controlled by specifying hot & medium colours of the lava, and a greyscale heatmap.
The same lava shader, but with some additional brightening at the end of the drips to show thinning of the stream.
Campaign map shroud/fog of war shader. Layered flow-mapped clouds, with a periodic sparkle effect, and proximity fade.
The campaign water shader, used for all oceans/lakes/rivers on the campaign map. The shader uses a global low-res flow map so that we can have seamless transitions from bodies of water.
The shader approximates the diffuse-effect when viewing waves from a distance, by increasing the roughness based on camera position.
The shore waves are driven through the underlying height map, with noise layered to disrupt their shapes & frequency.
associate technical artist
April ‘20 to March ‘21
Started development on a ‘DCC Agnostic API’ Python package - a wrapper of Max & Maya’s Python APIs. This allowed the team to work on a tool as a logical concept, instead of having to know the specific command for Max or Maya, and removed the need to create a separate tool for the same functionality across the two.
Began learning Houdini.
Continued to work on various shader tasks.
Shipped DLCs for Warhammer II (bug-fixes & shader content):
The Warden & The Paunch
The Twisted & The Twilight
trainee technical artist
July ‘19 to March ‘20
I joined CA shortly after the launch of Three Kingdoms, and during the earlier stages of development of Warhammer III, alongside Warhammer II & Three Kingdoms DLC.
My initial tasks focused on learning Total War’s proprietary game engine, Warscape, how data works with the engine, and how shaders are created using CA’s in-house node based shader editor.
I also learned how to apply my previous programming experience to work on a larger codebase, including learning MAXscript.
Regular reviewing of code & shader submissions.
Shipped DLCs for Total War: Warhammer II (shader content & character imposters):
The Hunter & The Beast
The Shadow & The Blade
Bournemouth University
BA Computer Visualisation and Animation
first class honours
September ‘16 to June ‘19
Shader Programming, both writing HLSL & node-based in UE4.
Hard Surface Environment Art, using Maya, Substance Painter/Designer & Unreal Engine 4.
C++ programming for real-time rendering (see my project on Temporal Anti-Aliasing)
C++ programming for large scale crowd simulations.
Python scripting for Maya (some of which was included as a student poster at Eurographics 2019).
Southend High School
A level
September ‘14 to June ‘16
A in Mathematics (A2)
B in Fine Art (A2)
B in Physics (A2)
C in Music (AS)
GCSE
September ‘12 to June ‘14
A in Fine Art
A in English Language
A* with distinction in Further Mathematics
A* in Mathematics
A* in Physics