MILITARY CONTRACT WORK
For eight years I was a Senior Artist, contracted by the U.S. Army’s Gaming Interactive Technologies and Multimedia Team through WisEngineering. Primarily what we focused on was creating simulators to interactively train Soldiers and Marines on how to maintain and use weapons and equipment. While the work was rewarding, it left a huge hole in my portfolio. Due to the nature of the projects, unfortunately, I am unable to show just about anything I have worked on while under contract.
My job, along with a relatively small team of Artist, consisted of reverse engineering large scale mobile artillery and tanks. For weapons such as the M109A6 Paladin, we painstakingly researched, field measured, modeled and textured everything inside and out from the entire engine assembly to the internal workings of the turret. Depending on the weapon’s use everything then needed to be brought into a virtual high bay or battlefield environment within the Unity game engine. Once in Unity the soldier’s avatar was tasked with performing specific maintenance tasks or load and fire scenarios.
The images that you see here, were just about the only images that I was given permission to use. This was background, prototype helicopter that we used in a future vertical lift marketing piece. Due to the odd propeller configuration, there was often much debate among us artist as to whether this helicopter could even fly . Most likely not. And that’s probably why they let me use it.