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Paolo Surricchio Graphics/Core Engine Programmer
Skills
| - Excellent at C/C++ | - Excellent at HLSL/GLSL |
| - Excellent at DirectX 11 and GCN Architecture | - Excellent at Shader Programing and Optimization |
| - Excellent at OpenGL 4.0+ | - Good knowledge of OpenCL |
| - Console experience | - Confident with GPU and CPU profilers |
| - Confident with version control programs (Perforce, SVN) | - Confident with Microsoft Visual Studio Suite |
Education
DigiPen Institute of Technology, Redmond, WA, GPA: 3.77
Master of Science in Computer Science, May 2012
Universita' degli Studi Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy, Final Grade: 101 out of 110
Bachelor Degree in Computer Science May, July 2010
Work and Projects
Respawn Entertainment:
- Apex (PC, XBox, PS4) - Senior Rendering Programmer - August 2020 / Present Day
| - FX Rendering |
Santa Monica Studio:
- Senior Staff Rendering Programmer - May 2018 / July 2020
| - I held the position of Point of Contact for the Rendering team toward content creators (artists, designers, production); I worked closely with Technical Director, reporting tasks and requirements for the game and designing solutions that fit the production schedule. |
- God of War (PS4) - Senior Rendering Programmer - December 2015 / May 2018
| - completely re-wrote material fx system (system responsible for spawning a reaction when something hits something else), porting the old system and data to the new one with a “zero-day-down” policy; designed an easy to use but powerful system taking into account sound, combat design, level design and fx artist requirements; worked with tech-art to write a PyQt UI for the framework to easily enter and modify data, and automatically translate the UI in our data definition language in text file, worked with physics to reuse ray cast data to allow for optimal reuse of collision data; throughout the project the specs kept on changing but the system evolved adapting to new requirements while keeping the same core philosophies and principles |
| - found and fixed bugs and optimized decal system (better stenciling options, many culling and rendering optimizations) |
| - inherited cloth system and fixed many multithreading bugs, optimized cloth jobs distribution |
| - took responsibility for a lot of new hire ramp up process in the middle of the production cycle |
| - took responsibility for creating an in-depth wiki about all particle features, inspiring others as an example of “how ideally things should be done” |
| - throughout the project I took upon myself to clean up a lot, A LOT, of technical debt, and received praises from colleagues more than once thanking me for having cleaned up something and how that made their tasks easier |
| - spent a lot of time working with content creators to create day-one to shipping solutions, concentrating on what we would need as a team, where we could cut corners, and how we could make sure the solutions would scale |
| - inherited and shipped an entire new gpu based particle system engine and worked closely with fx artists to create state of the art fx GPU pipeline; I took charge of the entire eco-system of fx, from high level combat scripting API, to low level GPU optimizations for both async compute shader particle simulation and rendering; fixed many fx bugs, amongst which many gpu syncing issues and particle simulation mistakes; worked on many fx features suchas weather fx (camera following wrapping volumes) for infinite snow/rain, MFX particle raycast for particles spawning other particle systems, screen space emitters (per pixel mesh emitters), and half res particles, as well as many small particle features for particle simulation, worked really closely with fx artists to make sure all features in the new system would respect the same logic and design philosophy, gpu buffer memory optimizations, wrote around 50 wiki pages explaining all new systems and requirements (particle lifetime, scripting and combat design API) and maintained along the project |
| - throughout the project I implemented countless engine and rendering optimizations |
Amazon Game Studio:
- Lumberyard Engine (Sept 2015 / December 2015)
| - fixed lots of bugs amongst which: texture streaming multithreading bugs, Qt editor bugs, and asset pipeline bugs |
Siggraph 2015 presentation:
- User Centric Tools Programming in Firewatch Los Angeles, August 2015
| - after the experience on Firewatch, I was contacted to speak about how I supported a team of small artists and empowered them to create the vast world of Firewatch |
| - user centric tools programming is a design approach to tools programming that shifts the focus on specific goal solving and usability studies centered around a specific user trying to solve a specific problem |
Campo Santo:
- Firewatch (May 2014 / Sep 2015)
| - lead graphics/core engine programmer: on a team of ten I was completely in charge of everything that was graphics/core related: from tools to shaders, from the streaming system to level editing support |
| - changed the SECTR streaming library to have non spatial streaming and support recursive streaming levels |
| - starting from the Marmoset shader framework in Unity 4.3, ported, maintained, optimized and customized the framework and ported it to the Unity 5 deferred pipeline |
| - modified unity shaders to support translucency and full deferred terrain rendering with the deferred pipeline |
| - supported artists with a varied set of tools, from geometry painters to new materials, from procedurally generated content authoring tools to memory and streaming visualizer |
| - completely in charge of moving the team through the Unity 4.3 to Unity 5 transition (no team downtime) |
| - implemented the whole environment system where each independent component (fog, sun, sky, …) can be changed independently from the other through easy-to-use triggers places around the world |
| - ported and fixed most shader errors to PS4 |
| - reverse engineered most issues by the way of graphic profiling builds of the game (the game is developed with Unity without source access) |
| - implemented many Post-FX that allowed both environment artist and concept artist to quickly iterate in the engine in real time: WYSIWYG approach to all graphic tools |
High Moon Studios:
- Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (PC, XBox 360, PS3, XBox One, PS4) (February 2013 / May 2014)
| - floating point to BC5/DXN normal map compression for high quality smooth normals |
| - HDR to MDR reflection probe encoding for HDR lighting with low memory impact |
| - fixed complicated loss bug in the lighting pipeline for SH probe |
| - implemented tools and low level code for deferred light sprite in a forward pipeline |
| - implemented many post-FX shaders on current-gen hardware from next-gen specs (cloak shader and special grenade shaders) |
| - implemented scene luminance detection for tonemapping on XBox 360 |
| - fixed and improved Custom Scripting Language allowing designers to keep more debug info in debug version but optimizing content and memory occupation in release version |
| - worked on many parts of the asset build pipeline for custom current-gen optimizations |
| - detected, fixed and optimized light clipping bug for dynamic lights |
| - detected shadow map optimization and implemented a tool to allow artist to selectively optimize map portions shadow map |
| - optimized current-gen version of shaders and fixed many shader bugs |
| - changed the entire lightmapping engine pipeline, from tools to game, to allow artists and designer to dynamically change lightmap resolution baking option for high quality bakes or really fast bakes |
| - worked closely to artists and designers and taught them to use profiling tools to optimize game content |
- Deadpool (PC, XBox 360, PS3) (May 2012 / February 2013)
| - implemented the main rendering feature of the game, real time charater dismemberment; from the shader tool pipeline and script hooks, to the low level render target management and dismemberment rendering, I designed and implemented this feature |
| - implemented many advanced shaders for current-gen hardware among which water shader with reflection-refraction and optimized skin shader |
| - fixed many rendering bugs as well as implemented and optimized features like real time reflection |
| - worked closely to artists and designers to optimize content memory occupation on current-gen hardware |
| - implemented and fixed many FX to allow FX artists to create new content with old tools |
| - worked with physically based pipeline |
College: DigiPen Institute of Technology (MSCS) and Universita' di Milano Bicocca (BSCS):
I concentrated my studies in software design and programming, especially focusing them on Game Development. I learned and focused on C/C++, game engine design and programming and advanced rendering techniques.Notes
I currently speak English and Italian. I have worked on Microsoft Windows, Linux platforms and Mac OSX. I have already worked in teams of different size, from 10 to 200, and I am already familiar with most of the software engineering development techniques such as SCRUM and agile programming. I am used to SCRUM managing software for task scheduling (Pivotal Tracker). I daily use subversion programs for every project I work on.
