Welcome!

I'm a Technical Artist in the Seattle area. Thanks for visiting!

I'm currently a Senior Technical Artist on the Arena team at Wizards of the Coast. At Wizards I work with our animated assets, rigging characters and creating animation logic in Unity. I also write and maintain PyMel export scripts for our art pipeline, and develop C# scripts for artist-focused tools or complex behaviors.

My primary areas of interest are in art pipelines and tools development, though I do a bit of rigging and shader development as well. I'm proficient with Python/Pymel in Maya, and C# in Unity.

Feel free to drop me an email at joseph.danaher.ta@gmail.com  

Background

I've been employed as a Technical Artist for a little over 10 years now, and it's something I really have a lot of passion for. I love game development and the types of problems you get to solve, and it's great to help people out who'd probably rather be making awesome art anyway.

In that time I've developed pipeline tools for Maya, wrote surface and vfx shaders, and helped manage content for several large-scale projects with hundreds of assets. I like establishing efficient workflows and content processes, and enjoy acting as a bridge between art and engineering.

I was a member of the Central Technology Group at Z2 for many years, working on a proprietary game engine named Zengine. I was focused on the content pipeliine and shader development for the growing needs of our game teams. 

There I was the Product Owner of Zen Art Tools — a suite of tools for Maya designed to increase efficiency and streamline the process of getting assets into the game. It also served as a central framework for file management, day-to-day workflow tools for animation, lightmap baking, and material/textures. It was a team effort, and we continued to use the framework on our Unity projects.