Richard Horne
Shader and Rendering Engineer
Passionate and resourceful shader/rendering engineer with nearly 20 years of experience delivering content-defining visuals from mobile to AAA video games. Collaborative, fundamentally-grounded, and innovative problem-solver. Adept at navigating technical and artistic requirements to provide novel look developments that promote consensus across departments and stakeholders. A rendering alchemist that routinely distills complexity into accessible shaders and tools to overclock iteration times and empower artists to create.
Technical Skills
Expert-level experience with HLSL
Expert-level experience with C Sharp
Strong knowledge of current shading and rendering technologies and techniques
Strong knowledge of CG/VFX pipeline flows for runtime games
Strong knowledge of modular, node-based content generation workflows (Shadergraph, Substance Designer, Houdini)
Strong knowledge of procedural generation techniques
Strong debugging and shader optimization/LOD skills
Strong collaborator, unifier, and communicator
Determined, resourceful, and initiative
Devoted to cutting-edge look development and visual storytelling
Intermediate-level experience with Python
Expert-level experience with Unity 3D
Professional Experience
Founder
Runt, Inc.
Collaborate with art and creative directors to understand, amplify, prototype, and implement their vision within technical and production guidelines.
Author custom shaders, lighting rigs, render features, and runtime code modules that support art, design, and technical needs.
Establish approachable, intuitive artist interfaces and workflows to enforce asset specifications, compliance, and processing. These pipeline contributions reallocate hundreds of hours of development time toward content refinement and iteration.
Encourage best practices among artists with supporting documentation for custom shaders and content generation procedures.
Diagnose and optimize rendering costs across various platform endpoints to inform production and exceed expectations, with up to 10x performance gains.
Debug and eliminate visual errors and artifacts, improving visual fidelity and consistency across frames.
Design and integrate optimized runtime particle FX.
Founded a successful co-development studio, recruited and led an international team of engineers, and balanced profit margins to 40% while increasing billing 5x.
2010-Current
Senior Technical Artist
2K Sports
Promoted and implemented a shared, universal lighting and shader library which enabled the creation of a homogenous, signature style across the complete range of 2K products and compounded rendering gains between projects.
Innovated fundamental shader techniques to push runtime renders toward the cutting edge. Notable achievements were animated sweat maps, subsurface scattering approximation, custom per-pixel reflectance using prefiltered cube maps, and detail mapping.
Worked with leads on all custom shader, lighting, and performance improvements and assisted art directors in mastering the technology suite to achieve the desired vision.
Encouraged best practices among artists with supporting documentation for custom shaders and content generation procedures.
Assisted leads by tuning lighting and shader values for complex time-of-day and seasonal scenarios to establish a baseline for further refinement.