Danny McGillick

I’m currently a 3D and 2D artist working in the games industry across console, pc and mobile. I use mostly ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag, Unity and Photoshop. Previously I worked in advertising agencies as a Creative Technologist building augmented reality, motion sensing, 3D and mobile interactive experiences. Earlier still I built and supported high end graphics machines for post production along with their software. These were editing, compositing and 3d workstations by Silicon Graphics and Avid (Apple PowerPC). I studied Computer Science at UTS.

The bulk of my recent work is unnanounced and can’t be shown digitally, but here is my prior work.

Professional and Personal 3D/2D: Artstation
Advertising work: Cargo Collective

Email: danny.mcgillick@gmail.com | Phone: 0414559553
Address: 25 Romani St North Parramatta 2151.

Games industry

How I created assets for Blowfish Studios, Halfbrick Games, Torus Games:

Flexible workflow

• High poly assets with ZBrush and Substance Painter allows characters to be downrezzed to various platforms via retopo or auto LOD.
• Low poly diffuse assets created in Maya or ZBrush and UV’d in Unfold 3D to maximise texture coverage and focus texel density on the head and torso.
• Hand painted textures in 3D coat leveraging baked AO and edge maps to save time.
• Fast in-engine blockouts via decimation, auto uv, color ID maps and procedural textures.
• Use of 3D in concept phase for silhouette discovery using base meshes/kit bash rather than slow revisions of 2D turnaround.
• Create scripts for Maya and ZBrush, heavily customise hotkeys and UI to make apps specific to workflow.

Character and prop design

I started in stylised 2D and try to follow the same principles in 3D.

• All digital workflow: reference boarding, sketching, developing, iterating, painting over models in Photoshop via Wacom Cintiq display.
• Exploration of wide variety of forms, features and costume variations
• Strong use of reference of subject, style and workflow to add familiarity to fantasy.

Creative Technologist

I specialised in custom interaction for TBWA and We Are Social bridging design and programming departments. Clients included Nissan, Visa, IAG/NRMA, Roadshow, Kia, Sony Playstation, Coopers Brewery. All work was in Flash AS3 and Unity C#.

Games programming

Asset production and coding of in-banner games and interactives.

• Breakout clone: an in banner breakout game with multiple modes including multiball and super smash ball. Actionscript.
• Rhythm Game: tap as beats play in a song and markers pass an indicator
• Parking game : find and park in tough spots with minimal damage before the clock runs out. iOS cross compile from actionscript using Adobe AIR. Project lead and map editor and car control/collision systems.
• Ragdoll Twitter Game: use box2D physics library and parse Twitter feed
• Car Mod Simulator Project lead. Find and direct concept artist, hard surface modellers. Some hard surface 3D. Direct internal Unity dev and UI designer. Create car scene from unity store environment and asset packs plus custom items. Lighting. Unity browser plugin based.

Novel interactivity

• Webcam motion sensing and gesture control for Visa Paywave campaign (as3)
• Augmented Reality for Nissan 350Z. Programmed the flash app and created 3D Art (car was hand decimated from hi res asset). (AS3, Blender)
• Interactive Skybox for Nissan Micra. Lead project, coding of skybox environment and interactive element tracking, build of 3D elements. tech direction of Melbourne laneway photoshoot. AS3 and Away3D library.
• Motion Sensing Street Poster For NRMA campaign using Unity and Kinect clone. Creative Tech lead including programming of interactive elements and cleanup of motion data. Outsourcing/direction of 3D asset build.

Post industry build/support engineer, demo artist

In a variety of roles at resellers and post houses I built, installed and supported high end editing, compositing and 3D workstations. I also demoed products at Digital Media World.

• Silicon Graphics RISC Workstations: SGI Irix admin, support and education for operators. Install of machines and components such as dual graphics heads. CPU boards. Onyx, Octane, O2, Virtual PC.
• Avid Media Composer: Trained Avid Media Composer Support Rep providing support and software training to video editors. Install of Motion JPEG hardware and high throughput SCSI hardware, build of raid arrays, install of editing suites.
• SideFX Houdini: Official support rep for NSW. Learning and repurposing of latest feature demos, support to titles/bumper/film 3D artists at Channel 7, Engine Post, Animal Logic, Demo artist at trade shows including Digital Media World.
• General Support: build and support of large raid arrays, unix/pc/mac network file management (nfs/samba/afp). Shell/Bash scripting.

Workplaces

1. Blowfish Studios - Character Artist 3D/2D (2016-present)
   Character design, 3D Sculpting, retopo, low poly, UV unwrap, hand painted textures, PBR textures. PS4, XBoxOne, Switch, PC, browser, mobile.

   • Scholastic: Horizon, Spirit Animals.
   • Blowfish: Siegecraft Commander, Siegecraft Commander VR, Gunscape
   • Marshall Cavendish: Brainy Arkies
   • Unnanounce projects x2 Character design, look dev, pipeline explore, sculpting, retop, uv, PBR

2. Halfbrick Studios - Artist (2014-2016)
   2D art for titles in Korean market including Fruit Ninja Champions and a scrolling shooter. iOS, Android.

3. We Are Social - Creative Technologist (2013-2014)
   Flash, Unity, 3D modeling, digital illustration.

   • Clients: Roadshow, Kia, Heineken, Expedia

4. TBWA/Tequila (now TBWA/DAN) - Creative Technologist (2008-2013)
   Augmented reality, brand websites, in-banner games, motion tracking, outdoor installations. Flash, Unity, Blender, Maya.

   • Clients: Nissan, IAG, St.George, Playstation, eBay.

5. Torus Games - Artist (2002-2003)
   Minority Report GBA, Iron Man GBA, Ice Nine GBA. Pixel art, concepts and textures.

   • Clients: Marvel, Touchstone Pictures

6. HM3D, Future Reality, Engine - Software and hardware support rep (1998-2004)
   Began as 3rd year full time industry placement from UTS (selected based on graphics unit results).

   • SGI, Apple, Windows software/os/hardware install and support. Network and raid array support.
   • Avid Media Composer, SideFX Houdini support guy, some early Maya.

Education

B.Science (Computing) at University of Technology, Sydney. Included Kevin Suffern’s fantastic Computer Graphics subjects.

Art Courses

• Figure Drawing full time at Julian Ashton classic art school at The Rock, Sydney. Short, medium and long poses from life, long studies from plaster, clay sculpture.
• Gesture Drawing with Alex Woo (Pixar) at Schoolism.com

Video training via Michael Pavlovic(Certain Affinity), Shane Olsen (Avalanche), Nathan Fowkes(Dreamworks), Schoolism, CDA, SVS.