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LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/JovianFinch

Jovian Finch Nordgren

Senior Technical Artist

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