Contracting Senior Game Artist and Developer
Rochester, New York Area
- Current
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- Game Artist at Independent Contractor (Self-employed)
- Founder/CEO/Lead Designer and Developer at Emergent Behavior LLC
- Past
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- Lead Technical Artist at Vicarious Visions/Activision
- Senior Artist at Sony Computer Entertainment America
- Artist at Inland Productions
- Artist at Global Learning Technologies
- Education
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- State University of New York at Oswego
- Recommended
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4 people have recommended Ben - Connections
-
186
connections
- Industry
- Computer Games
- Websites
Ben Throop’s Summary
Ben is a game development generalist with specialization in 3D modeling, texturing, animation, rigging, simulation, and generally making pretty stuff that draws fast. With past lives in the mainstream game industry with Activision and Sony, as well as founding a web startup while coding a Flex app, he's now up to his chin in Unity and iPhone related projects. Read more at
http://variancetheory.com/about/about-ben/
He's booking for game art and development work starting in December 2009.
Ben Throop’s Specialties:
3dsmax, Modeling/Texturing/Animation, Special Effects and Physics Sim, Pipeline development and pre-production, Unity C# and Javascript, Flex AS3 and MXML, Advanced Maxscript, PHP, Wordpress, Drupal, mySQL, XML, AMFPHP
Ben Throop’s Experience
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Game Artist
Independent Contractor (Self-employed)
(Self-Employed; Design industry)
April 2009 — Present (8 months)
Game Art Generalist for Unity3d/iPhone games.
Providing...
- Low and High Poly Modeling
- Texturing
- Animation/Rigging
- Particle FX and Physics
- Maxscript exporters, pipelines, and utlilities
- External utilities via Flex, PHP, Python
Projects:
- FX Artist for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for Xbox 360/PS3
- Lead 3D Artist for unannounced iPhone title at Infrared5 (ongoing)
- Consulted for Infrared5 on trench art and Darth Vader's Tie Fighter in Star Wars : Trench Run for the iPhone
- Created the Detonator Parametric Explosion Framework for Unity3D. Developed via a grant through the Unity Summer of Code. -
Founder/CEO/Lead Designer and Developer
Emergent Behavior LLC
(Internet industry)
May 2007 — Present (2 years 7 months)
Founder/CEO/Lead Designer and Developer
Created MrsRiley.com, a site for the Autism and special needs community that has in-browser tools for making picture cards. It saves work in the cloud and enables easy sharing and collaboration.
- App developed with Flex 3
- Site developed with Drupal 6
- Responsible for design, code, branding, management, light bulb changing.
Site Launch in March 2009 -
Lead Technical Artist
Vicarious Visions/Activision
(Public Company; ATVI; Computer Games industry)
June 2004 — May 2007 (3 years )
- Design and implement content pipelines
- Solve difficult technical art issues
- Broad knowledge of console hardware
- Mentor staff
Highlights
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Co-designed and implemented an open-city pipeline that scaled from PSP to PS2/Wii using procedural geometry, instancing, and texture streaming. Wrote tools for geometry subdivision, radiosity lighting, collision geometry streamlining. Created a system to scale that technology to indoor levels.
Wrote a Maxscript tool for exporting animation that allowed the user to store animation range, scene state, and filename for export, enabling a single Max file to export multiple animation files in an automated fashion.
Created a sky system and artwork for Spiderman 3 that cycled time of day as well as seamlessly changed weather.
Wrote an automated PVS geometry chopping system in Max that was used on several projects.
Served as lead prototype artist on several projects through initial spec phase. Created documentation and advised on scoping. Worked with small teams to generate prototype art with evolving engine technology.
Shipped Titles:
- Spiderman2 PSP
- Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam DS
- Over the Hedge DS
- Batman Begins GBA
- Spiderman3 PS2/PSP/Wii
Canceled Titles:
- Batman Begins PSP
- Ultimate Spiderman 2 PSP
- Call of Duty PSP -
Senior Artist
Sony Computer Entertainment America
(Public Company; SNE; Computer Games industry)
2000 — 2004 (4 years )
Lead Character Artist
Lead FX Artist
Moonlighting Technical Artist
Highlights
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Co-created a full featured character customization system with both model and texture switching and intelligent object grouping. Also led a team of 2 other character artists and was responsible for concepts and production assets.
Responsible for all gun-hit particle fx as well as many other in-game fx.
Build a radiosity lighting pipeline in Max.
Created marketing images of characters shooting guns with giant explosions.
Titles:
- Syphon Filter 3
- Syphon Filter: Omega Strain
- Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror -
Artist
Inland Productions
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Games industry)
August 1998 — December 2000 (2 years 5 months)
- Arctic Thunder (Midway - PS2/Xbox)
- Ultimate Hunt Challenge (EA - PC)
- WCW Thunder (THQ - PS1) -
Artist
Global Learning Technologies
(Computer Games industry)
1997 — 1997 (less than a year)
Ben Throop’s Education
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State University of New York at Oswego
BFA , Art/Computer Science , 1992 — 1997
Ben Throop’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
- career opportunities
- consulting offers
- new ventures
- job inquiries
- expertise requests
- business deals
- reference requests
- getting back in touch
