Michael McDonald

Sr. Artist

Weta Gameshop / Magic Leap

• Assisting the Art director with the technical art requirements of the project.
• Collaborating with our infrastructure and tools teams to find solutions towards achieving both the creative vision and technical requirements of the project.
• Providing the art team with mentorship and training to support best practices and to ensure all art assets were meeting the performance criteria set.
• Collaborating with external engineers and SDK teams to improve rendering and performance issues on device, and learning how to create app icons in Kali.
• Creating environments, characters, lighting, shaders, and visual effects.
• Assisting the leads and producers with identifying art optimisation tasks and helping bridge our art and code teams to reach our performance benchmarks.

Lead Environment Artist / Sr. Specialist Artist

Electronic Arts

• Conceptualising, greyboxing, modeling, texturing, lighting, optimising, polishing and delivering real-time art assets and level environments for high budget game titles on iOS and Android.
• Working closely with the Sr. Art Lead to ensure all art across the project is consistently high quality and meets our high level objectives.
• Supervising environment artists by providing mentorship, constructive feedback, art guidelines, reference materials and documentation, as well as hosting scrum meetings, assisting with sprint planning, and task scheduling.
• Collaborating with internal and external teams including: Game Development, Engine Core, Marketing, Legal, Creative Services and Publishing to help plan and produce exciting new game content and improve upon art tools/pipelines.
• Providing look development images, proof of concepts, visual target images, pre-vis videos, and case studies to assist with the projects visual direction.

Mid-Level Artist

Electronic Arts

• Modeled and textured real-time environments, characters, vehicles and props for a wide variety of game titles on iOS and Android platforms.
• Collaborated with designers and Art Leads to ensure environments were effectively facilitating gameplay, free of bugs, and of high visual quality.

3D Artist (Contract)

Tin Man Games

• Provided outsourced art assets for IronMonkey Studios and Firebrand Games.
• Created environment models and textures for games on iOS and Nintendo DS.

Environment Artist (Contract)

Grinding Gear Games

• Created tileable environment assets to support procedurally generated levels.

3D Artist (Technical Lead)

Mere Mortals

• Created cinematics and real-time art assets for game titles on Nintendo Wii.
• Established lighting methods and art optimisation techniques for the team.

Art Lead / Co-Founder

Disyi Arts

• Helped manage the business direction of a small start-up games studio.
• Directed a small art development team to create our own original IP.

Art Tutor

Bubble Dome Ltd

• Taught 3D art skills to students and other teachers.
• Prepared and managed lessons and lectures.

Graduate Diploma of Game Development (Art Stream)

Media Design School

• Recipient of the Sidhe Interactive Scholarship for 2006.

Diploma of Multimedia

Natcoll Design Technology