Vas'Drakken

210 18th St Apt#4
Huntington Beach, CA 92648
United States
ph: (609)-384-6283
ben@vasdrakken.com

Resume

Benjamin Solheim
210 18th Street Apt#4 Huntington Beach, CA 92648

(609)-384-6283 | ben@vasdrakken.com

http://www.vasdrakken.com/

Objective: To find challenging and rewarding work in a dynamic environment.

Education:

Full Sail University Orlando, FL - July 2008

Ocean County College Toms River, NJ - December 2005

Work Experience:

Zoic Studios

Intern / Artist January 2010 – June 2010

Transporting Digital Media, between Studios in the greater LA area
Built assets for production leads and producers, under short deadlines
Kept my mouth shut about items under NDA
Worked in the modeling discipline, shading and lighting, Textures and UVs, Animation for one small object, and rigging an intern project with SDK to mimic a rigged and weighted character that due to being hard surface and non-deforming could be cheated with a low over head rig.

Mechanized Propulsion Systems Inc.

Digital Artist / Technical Artist January 2009 – Present

Rendering hardware and software optimization, installing and configuring Linux and Windows workstations, software and hardware troubleshooting
Taking existing assets and integrating with new Art assets and updating as time allows for promotion material. Adding and or replacing textures, material and lighting.

3D previsualization - lighting, modeling, rigging, texturing
Utilizing set driven keys, hierarchy structure, and spline curves to rig a hard-surface model with minimal overhead, and appearing to the animator to be an IK rig.
Building the environment from the 3D pre-visualization – building the foreground and backdrop as a mix of 3D and 2D cards, lighting and rendering the scene.

Vizual F/X Studios LLC - defunct

Modeler & Texture Artist September 2008 – January 2009

Responsible for translating 2D concept art into Polygon Meshes for use in Vizual FX's proprietary game engine, and for Xbox live title.

Modeling & U/V Mapping in Maya
Creating Zbrush-ready hard surface and organic low resolution Polygon Meshes
Building and detailing high-resolution hard surface models in Maya for use as Normal Maps.
Worked with both Realistic (MMO) and Toon Style (Cart Game)

Various Staffing Agencies

Systems Engineer October 2001 – November 2005

Systems Engineer, Information Technology Consultant
Military/Civilian Projects, Roll outs, Site Surveys, Sweep Team
Tech Solve Global: 10/2003 – 7/2005 System Engineer
Mars Employment, Inc: 1/2003 – 5/2004 System Engineer
Abbtech Staffing, NMCI Project: 8/2002 – 10/2005 Tier 3 Sweep Team / System Engineer

United States Air Force

AAWSJ / Medical Admin / Weather Forecaster

E – 4 Senior Airman July 1997 – August 2001

Technical Skills:

Art and computer skills

Firm understanding of lighting and color theory
Traditional Sketching on pads and doodling in Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro 9
Polygon and NURBS Modeler with subsets in Environments, Textur, Rigging and Scripting.
Familiarity with Maya and 3DMax’s modeling, texture and lighting systems.
Effective use of transparency in creation of efficient foliage and fake windows.
Lighting and Shading optimization for Mental Ray render and game engine renders.

Multi-pass rendering and composition using Diffuse, Specular, Shadow and Occlusion passes.
Maya application development - Mel Script tool development to assist in building complex objects.
Integration of high and low resolution assets, from Maya, Max, Zbrush, C4D through object conversion and the use of FBX file format.
Understanding of Unreal engine optimization of assets.
Geometry optimization for normal maps.

Patience and logical able to resolve issues without getting overwhelmed or frustrate.

Creating efficient foliage rendering, both as paint effects and simple transparent plane.
Mental Ray render optimization
Programming & Scripting Background (Mel, C++, Assembler and Java Script.

old

210 18th St Apt#4
Huntington Beach, CA 92648
United States
ph: (609)-384-6283
ben@vasdrakken.com