Resume

Michael Cook

Principal Technical Artist | Technical Art Director | Pipeline Architect

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Technical Art Director and pipeline architect with 20+ years of experience spanning AAA games, television / film VFX, and real-time entertainment. Proven track record building and leading technical art teams, prototyping and shipping production-scale rigging and asset pipelines, and bridging art, animation, design, and engineering. Deep expertise in Maya tool development, Unreal Engine integration, real-time lighting and materials, and environment art workflows. Shipped titles include Apex Legends and Highguard. Emmy and VES award winner.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Technical Art Director

Wildlight Entertainment | Feb 2022 – Present | Shipped: Highguard

Led a team of 4 technical artists while owning all weapon/prop rigging and the full tools and pipeline portfolio. Partnered with Art, Animation, Environment Art, Design, and Engineering to prototype workflows, define asset budgets, optimize content, and ship production-quality systems on an Unreal Engine title.

Guided development of Wildrig, a data-centric character rigging pipeline. Authored custom Maya nodes (Space Switch, Soft IK, Matrix Constraint) extending the suite with performant solutions.
Built a rapid weapon/prop rigging pipeline with embedded metadata, enabling artists to virtually rig, preview in-engine, and export FBX from their art files in a single click.
Designed AssetForge, an end-to-end MTX asset pipeline handling stub-in, outsource packaging, ingestion, validation, Perforce integration, and automated Unreal material/texture generation.
Wrote a custom FBX export plugin from scratch with joint merging, auto-triangulation matching Maya’s internal triangulation, and round-trip metadata for one-click Unreal-to-Maya traversal.
Ported all Unreal master materials to Maya DX11 shaders for near-1:1 PBR parity with real-time lighting and Substance Painter/Designer texture support, plus multiple debug modes for cross-department art reviews.
Architected a full Xsens mocap processing pipeline—import, automatic cleanup, and retargeting to any character rig in the project.
Created Wildlight Configurator, a DCC distribution tool automating software download, installation, configuration, licensing, and update management for rapid artist onboarding.
Built a custom Unreal scene exporter for Blur cinematics, solving packed level actor and level instance traversal limitations not handled by UE 5.3’s native exporters.
Developed an Animation Pose Library (JSON + base64 thumbnails) and an automated in-game thumbnail capture system.
Built environment art workflow tools including a Collision Setup system (axis-aligned bounding box and convex hull generation) and a World Auto Mapper for rapid UV generation on environment meshes.

Technical Artist / Senior Technical Artist / Lead Technical Artist

Respawn Entertainment | Jul 2017 – Feb 2022 | Shipped: Apex Legends

Progressed from Technical Artist to Lead, managing a team of 2 pipeline-focused tech artists. Supported art and animation production on a live-service AAA shooter.

Led a studio-wide content cleanup and naming convention initiative, enabling reliable tool automation across all asset types for the first time at the studio.
Built the MTX asset stub-in pipeline, dramatically accelerating cosmetic content production.
Rigged notable hero characters including Revenant.
Wrote the RUI Editor for authoring all weapon reticles and banner cards with dynamic animations and node-based setup.
Rigged weapons, props, and characters while supporting art and animation teams with pipeline tools.

Senior 3D Artist / Pipeline TD

Stargate Studios | Jun 2003 – Jul 2017

Started as a 3D generalist and grew into pipeline and tools development over 14 years in film and television VFX. Contributed to Emmy and VES award-winning productions.

Full-stack VFX artist with strong environment art foundation: modeling, environments, characters, animation, texturing, real-time lighting, dynamics, effects, tracking, and compositing.
Developed studio tools and pipeline automation, transitioning the team toward efficient production workflows. Credits include The Walking Dead, Heroes, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Las Vegas, and Spartacus.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Engines & Real-Time: Unreal Engine (4/5), Unity, Real-Time Lighting & Materials, PBR Workflows, DX11 Shaders, Look Dev

DCC & Content: Maya (expert), ZBrush, Mudbox, Photoshop, After Effects, Substance Painter/Designer

Programming: Python, C#, C++ (Maya plugins), JavaScript, PHP, HTML

Pipeline & Tools: Asset Pipeline Architecture, Mocap Processing (Xsens), DCC Automation, Environment Art Workflow, Perforce

Tracking & Comp: PFTrack, Boujou, Compositing Workflows

AWARDS

Creative Arts Emmy — Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series, 2009 — Heroes
Creative Arts Emmy — Outstanding Special VFX for a Miniseries/Movie/Special, 2007 — Nightmares & Dreamscapes
VES Award — Outstanding Models & Miniatures in Broadcast, 2005 — Las Vegas
VES Award — Outstanding Created Environment in Live Action Broadcast, 2004 — Spartacus

EDUCATION

Mt. San Antonio College | Figure Art, Programming, Maya | 2002 – 2003