About
I’m in my first year of Clemson’s MS in Digital Production Arts! It was a bit of an interesting route getting here, but it’s exciting to get to focus full time on physics based simulations and computer graphics (other than the time void that is 3D modeling).
Hobbies:
Hydrofoiling
Weight Lifting
Rogue Likes
Romantasy
Pampering my Pomeranian
Professional Interests:
Physics based simulations
fluids/cloth/smoke/rigid body/soft body dynamics
Software Engineering
Parallel Computing
A bit of background:
I graduated from NC State with a BS in physics in 2019, worked for a year in software testing for medical imaging, co-founded Look Left Studio in 2021, spent the next four years learning computer science and game development, shipped an iOS app, and developed a custom network architecture for competitive multiplayer games.
All of this was to gain the experience to tackle developing physics based simulations, and I’m excited to be pursuing this at Clemson in the Digital Production Arts program!
A more in depth background
In the Beginning:
Way back in 2015 I started undergrad at NCSU majoring in physics. It wasn’t until my senior semester through courses like mathematical modeling and computational physics that I discovered I really enjoyed programming. I found taking complex systems and bringing them off of paper and to life through code extremely satisfying. This was solidified during 2019 when I attended SIGGRAPH for the first time and was blown away by some of the incredible physics based simulations driving effects in both film and games.
After researching the career paths of others in the film and game industry doing R&D on physics simulations, I noticed a lot of people actually started in medical imaging. This led to me working Fujifilm Medical Systems after graduating. While there I created test oracles to verify the accuracy of measurements performed on DICOM images, and also patented a novel subpixel-based image region of interest rendering algorithm.
To New Horizons:
In mid 2023 my co-founder and artist joined full time and we spent six months learning our workflows by shipping our app, Chronos Habit Tracker. This app was also fully built in Godot, and we drew on my experience learning agile development from Fujifilm and Robert C Martins Agile Software Development book to keep progress rolling and workflows synced until we shipped.
Eventually we concluded that a competitive multiplayer game was a bit too much for two people, so since then I have been looking for what’s next. Some of the notable things I have been working on since then are learning OpenGL through Cem Yuksul’s Interactive Computer Graphics course from the University of Utah, Houdini through this stanford course, technical art through this ELVTR course, and polishing my network architecture to have a cleaner ECS architecture with C++ using GDNative.
After a bit of professional experience designing maintainable and impactful software, I figured it was time to carve my own path and step directly into the gaming industry. Because what better way to demonstrate my new found computer science skills than to take a career gamble, quit my job, and build a competitive multiplayer game as my first project?
And so I co-founded Look Left Studio.
Two and a half years, several comp sci textbooks, at least ten watches of ‘Overwatch’ Gameplay Architecture and Netcode, over 20,000 lines of code, a complete rebuild, and over 2,500 hours of documented heads down work later, and I had the core multiplayer architecture completed. The only thing that kept me sane and pushed back the imposter syndrome was attending GDC in 2022 to see ‘Knockout City’s’ Parallel, Deterministic, and Rewindable Entity System. They built nearly the same network architecture I was striving for over the course of two years with two plus full time engineers. So it taking me two and a half years to complete my network architecture wasn’t ridiculous.
