Nia Okonkwo Senior Technical Artist
Rockville, MD • techartist@gmail.com • +1 301-555-0148
Profile Summary
- Senior Technical Artist with 9 years of experience shipping a AAA open-world RPG franchise across character pipeline, materials, and procedural environments, specializing in shader authoring, Houdini procedural pipelines, and artist-facing Python tooling.
- Solid technical background across engine (Unreal Engine 5), shader tools (Unreal Material Editor + HLSL), DCC stack (Maya, Houdini), texturing on Substance Painter, scripting in Python, VFX on Niagara, procedural pipelines with Houdini Engine + HDAs, and target platforms PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, with strong fundamentals in art-first technical thinking, tight artist feedback loops, and a strong respect for performance budgets.
- Deep expertise in shader authoring and material-library design, art pipeline and DCC-to-engine tooling, rigging, skinning, and runtime animation tech, and procedural pipelines with Houdini and HDAs, applying practices such as performance-budget-aware authoring and artist-enablement scripting and editor extensions to deliver ship-quality, perf-clean, and artist-empowering tech-art systems.
- Engaged collaborator working cross-functionally with Character Art, Environment Art, Animation, VFX, Lighting, and Engineering leadership in long-cycle AAA productions with weekly art reviews, contributing to art-pipeline reviews, perf war rooms, and look-dev retrospectives with a pragmatic, artist-empathy-first mindset.
- Senior IC who shares technical excellence and fosters a culture of art-review and capture-review rigor and performance-budget and naming-convention discipline through tooling-driven enablement and shader mentorship, while running weekly tech-art guild and shader-library review sessions and authoring widely adopted tech-art handbooks.
Technical Skills
- Engines & Editors:
- Unreal Engine 5 (C++ + Blueprints + Python), Unity 6 (C# editor extensions), Godot 4 (cross-engine study), Perforce, GitHub
- Shaders & Materials:
- Unreal Material Editor + HLSL custom nodes, Unity Shader Graph + HLSL, Amplify, ShaderFX, stylized + PBR material libraries
- DCC & Texturing:
- Maya (daily), Houdini, Blender, 3ds Max, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Marmoset Toolbag
- Scripting & Tools:
- Python (Maya + Unreal + Houdini), MEL, MaxScript, C# (Unity editor), PySide / Qt for tool UIs, Perforce + Git automation
- Rigging & Animation Tech:
- Maya rigging, control rigs (Unreal Control Rig), blend shapes, IK / FK, facial rigs (ARKit / FaceWare), runtime animation systems
- VFX & Particles:
- Niagara, Unity VFX Graph, Houdini sims, flipbooks, particle shaders, texture-driven FX, lightning / fire / smoke / water systems
- Procedural & Houdini:
- Houdini Engine + HDAs, SideFX Labs, PDG, procedural environments / foliage / destruction / terrain, Substance generators
- Performance & Look Dev:
- Unreal Insights, RenderDoc, PIX, polycount / LOD authoring, texture compression + atlasing, shader-complexity views, lighting + color-grade authoring
Education
Savannah College of Art and Design
B.F.A. in Interactive Design & Game Development (Technical Art track)
Work Experience
Bethesda Game Studios
Senior Technical Artist
- Serve as the tech-art bridge for Bethesda's flagship open-world RPG on the Creation Engine, supporting 60+ artists across 4 disciplines and partnering with engineering on Character, Environment, VFX, and Animation pipelines.
- Authored the character + foliage + weather material library in Unreal Material Editor + HLSL custom nodes, with reusable layered functions, and cut material authoring from 4 hrs to 40 min per asset.
- Designed the Maya + Substance + Houdini -> Unreal asset pipeline with strict validators and naming-convention enforcement, taking asset-import errors dropped from 18% to under 2% per batch.
- Built Python + PySide auto-rig, asset-validator, and Unreal editor extensions for the art teams, adopted by 40+ artists; iteration loops from 12 min to 90 sec.
- Designed a modular character rig with face + cloth + IK layers on Unreal Control Rig + Maya, which shipped on 18 hero + 60 background characters with zero rebuilds across the program.
- Built the Niagara magic + weather + combat-feedback library with VFX artists, shipping 220+ reusable Niagara emitters; 14 ms VFX budget on-target across all launch zones.
- Built the Houdini HDA suite for forests + roads + destruction with the environment-art team, taking environment-art throughput up 3.2x; HDAs adopted by 18 env artists.
Crystal Dynamics
Technical Artist
- Drove the perf pass on mesh LODs, texture atlasing, and shader-complexity passes across the studio's flagship action-adventure title, delivering 2.1 ms draw-time savings per frame with no perceptual loss.
- Partnered with Lighting + Environment Art on lighting templates, post-process volumes, and color-grade LUTs, hitting visual-target sign-off on first review for 8 of 9 sequences.
- Mentored 3 mid-career artists through senior tech-art work, supporting 2 promotions to Senior, and authored the team's tech-art handbook (rigging + shader + perf-budget chapters) adopted across 3 art teams.
- Partnered with Character Art, Environment Art, Animation, VFX, Lighting, and Engineering teams across 2 shipped titles and 3 internal tech-demos, authoring 34 tool-design RFCs and shader-library breakdowns that became the team's tech-art baseline and onboarding 6 new artists onto the tech-art tooling stack.