# Jovian Finch Nordgren ### Senior Technical Artist JovianFinch.com | linkedin.com/in/JovianFinch --- ## Profile Technical Artist and 3D generalist with a decade of experience in AAA and indie game development, in both Unity and Unreal Engine. Best suited for small teams with broad scope: shaders, VFX, animation pipelines, asset optimization, tooling, procedural content, and any technical challenge the project surfaces. Years of QA work on large productions built a habit of asking why a problem exists, not just fixing it — and building processes so it doesn't recur. Picks up new tools, techniques, and codebases fast; currently using Claude Code and LLM workflows for tooling and pipeline problems. Comfortable at the deep end of a codebase or in a creative review. --- ## Experience ### Senior QA Engineer (Tech Art) | Epic Games | Remote **July 2023 – March 2026** *Lego Fortnite* Embedded across multiple Tech Art and content teams on Lego Fortnite, owning pipeline integrity and quality across FX, animation, content optimization, world/terrain, and procedural content. Served as animation domain liaison, coordinating test coverage, communicating risk, and keeping distributed QA teams in sync across a large-scale live project. - Root-caused a critical anim review video exporter (playblast) failure; identified working mitigation and contributed to requirements for the in-house replacement. - Identified root causes and solutions for multiple rare Switch-only rendering bugs, isolating platform-specific material and animation interactions through deep content investigation. - Recognized a pattern in escaped defects tracing back to untested FX across platforms and scalability settings; developed test cases and distributed them as team-specific guides so each content team could fold FX validation into their own workflows, scaling coverage without adding centralized overhead. - Built asset audit tools using Unreal Editor Utility Widgets and extended an existing C++ submit validator to enforce mesh LOD and triangle count standards at check-in. - Built an automation triage tool with Claude Code in a single day, integrating APIs and MCPs to generate an HTML report with cross-platform comparison, trend tracking, and Jira-linked failure notes. --- ### Technical Artist | Left Turn Studios | Seattle, WA / Remote **October 2021 – January 2023** *Alien Age (Steam, 2021) · Snuggles the Unicorn (canceled) · Grapple Star (demo)* Revenue-share contributor on Alien Age before Left Turn Studios incorporated in January 2022. Lead Technical Artist across all three Unity projects, with a second TA joining later on Snuggles. - Owned all shaders, VFX, lighting, and materials on Alien Age: custom water, volumetric fog, and world-position-seeded color variation shaders; full asset optimization including retopology, indexed textures, and reduced texture lookups. - Collaborated with an engineer to build a procedural foliage placement tool running in-editor to avoid runtime cost; documented it for level designers to regenerate independently. - Developed a vertex shader system for enemy wings on Snuggles, replacing a 32-bone-per-enemy rig with a shader-driven flap; used Material Property Blocks to randomize phase per instance so wings moved independently. - Built a puppet rig system to retarget existing animations onto a redesigned player model, preserving the existing animation investment without recreating them; scripted the constraint reconnection to rebuild automatically after asset updates. - Solved a Unity depth-of-field transparency issue on Grapple Star with a dual-camera Cinemachine composite: background rendered with post-processing, foreground VFX rendered sharp. --- ### Freelance & Independent Work | Seattle, WA **May 2019 – September 2021** Freelance creative work including graphic design and web projects. Used the period for self-directed technical study, including a crash course in Unity, real-time VFX, and shader development to stay current with industry tools. --- ### Test Engineer | Bungie, Inc. | Bellevue, WA **May 2015 – May 2019** *Destiny: The Taken King · Destiny 2 · D2: Curse of Osiris · D2: Forsaken* *Test Engineer (Nov 2017 – May 2019) · QA Tester (Mar 2016 – Nov 2017) · Embedded Contract via Randstad USA (May 2015 – Mar 2016)* - Mapped content workflows to identify systemic failure points, improving fix rates and overall product quality. - Analyzed runtime memory in high-risk areas, helping steer the project into memory budget for launch. - Built a debug config tool that triggered public event completion conditions on demand at any reward tier; the audio team adopted it independently for bucket testing that had been too time-consuming to run manually. - Established and documented workflow guides to accelerate onboarding and help the team operate independently. **3D Generalist — Destiny 2 Ambient Life Project (2017 – 2018)** Modeled, rigged, and animated shipped ambient life characters: owls in the Farm social space and the sea monster on Titan. Also developed a reactive NPC with custom animations and VFX, and prototyped an interactive beehive obstacle in a demo environment. --- ### Technical Artist, Capstone | DigiPen Institute of Technology | Redmond, WA **July 2014 – May 2015** *Relic · 3D action adventure · DigiPen Zero Engine* One of the most technically ambitious projects attempted in Zero Engine at the time. Owned all visual technical work and pushed the engine well past its documented limits. - Delivered FX, lighting, atmospherics (faked via custom shaders since the engine had no atmosphere system), materials, rendering and asset pipelines, rigging, character model, and environment art placement. - Identified engine constraints blocking the project's visual goals and worked directly with the chief engineer to understand and propose solutions rather than working around them; he implemented several engine-level changes as a result. - Led a mid-production strike team to re-evaluate scope; helped transition to a collaborative department-leads structure that stabilized a large team struggling with unified direction. - Won First Place for Best Spoken Dialog and Best Characters at the 2015 DigiPen Student Showcase; exhibited at PAX West 2015. - Also served as Animation Instructor for DigiPen's Project FUN (Summer 2013 & 2014), teaching traditional and digital animation workflows to students at varied skill levels. --- ## Skills **Real-Time & Rendering:** VFX, shader authoring, lighting, rendering, performance optimization **3D Art:** Modeling (low/high poly), sculpting, UV unwrap, texturing, rigging, skinning **Animation:** Traditional, 2D, 3D, tech animation support **Tools & Pipeline:** Asset auditing, LOD validation, pipeline tooling, workflow documentation, Perforce, Git **Scripting:** Python, C#, Lua **AI & Automation:** Claude Code, LLM-assisted development and tooling, Midjourney, API / MCP integration **Software:** Unreal Engine, Unity 3D, ZBrush, Maya, 3DS Max, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere, InDesign, Substance Designer & Painter, Visual Studio --- ## Education **BFA — Digital Art and Animation** DigiPen Institute of Technology · Redmond, WA **AA — General Studies | Certificate: Digital Illustration** Everett Community College · Everett, WA