Technical Artist, Real-Time 3D, Pipeline Automation & Performance
Francisco De Carvalho Pereira
Shipped on 6 console platforms · 300+ real-time assets/month for luxury brands · CGI screened theatrically
LET'S SING / VOXLER
11/2024 - 12/2025
Annual karaoke franchise.
Four editions shipped simultaneously across six console targets: PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2.
Role: Technical Artist, Tools & Pipeline
• Built a fully automated character render pipeline.
A headless Blender process driven by Python ingests raw art deliveries (meshes, rigs, animations, textures)
validates naming, assembles a pre-lit scene, resolves materials, skeletons and animation data,
and outputs every animation frame by frame, engine-ready for Unity. Artists drop files into a folder and double-click. No engineer is involved at any point in the loop. Covers 4 characters and ~100 unique animations. A half-day manual pass became a sub-60-second automated one. In continuous production use for 7 months, serving an asset cycle with a ~3 year lifespan.
• Built an animation validation tool for animators (Unity, C#). Animators drop clips into a folder, open a scene, and a single click applies the animation to a test rig. Scale and transform errors that were invisible in the DCC and previously only surfaced after a developer round-trip are now caught by the animator in seconds. Deliberately built to fit the animation team's existing workflow rather than force a change to it.
• Built a runtime gaze system. Eye and pupil control decoupled from baked animation, so characters react live to
on-screen events while playing authored performance animation.
• Optimisation across six hardware targets: PS4, PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X/S.
• Draw call reduction through LOD strategies and batching, holding visual targets across a wide performance spread.
• R&D on real-time rendering techniques (glow, bloom, VFX) to meet a fixed art direction within fixed frame budgets.
FITTINGBOX
02/2024 - 06/2024
Commercial real-time 3D product visualisation.
Virtual try-on deployed to web and mobile for international eyewear brands, under hard bandwidth and device constraints.
Role: 3D Designer, Real-Time Product Visualisation
• Created and optimised over 300 real-time assets per month for virtual try-on experiences
used by luxury eyewear brands.
• Integrated large asset datasets into proprietary real-time pipelines.
• Maintained visual fidelity under strict web and mobile performance budgets, in close collaboration with engineers
WARNO / EUGEN SYSTEMS
07/2023 - 01/2024
Large-scale real-time tactics title on a proprietary in-house engine. Maps built to real-world scale with continuous world streaming.
Role: World Builder, Large-Scale Environments
• Owned end-to-end implementation of a complete production map:
layout, terrain, environment data and final optimisation.
• Built large-scale urban and architectural environments (street networks, building blocks, props) using proprietary engine tooling.
• Assembled and maintained 4 modular environment kits covering distinct regions, enforcing consistent real-world scale, proportion and spatial accuracy across the full map.
• Designed terrain and layout pipelines using World Machine procedural generation.
• Optimised environments for world streaming and runtime performance at scale.
RUBBER / TECHREFT Studio
10/2022 - 06/2023
Arcade driving game on Unreal Engine 5. Vehicle dynamics, custom rig and destruction systems.
Role: Technical Direction / Vehicle Systems
Original concept pitched to the class, selected for production, then led the project through to release:
technical direction across the team, pipeline decisions, and the public itch.io release page.
• Tuned a complete vehicle dynamics model on Unreal Engine 5's Chaos Wheeled Vehicle system mass distribution, torque curves, wheel friction, cornering stiffness, suspension spring rates iterated against playtest feedback until handling read correctly at speed.
• Built a custom 6-wheel rig in Blender for accurate per-wheel ground response, then integrated it into Unreal's physics pipeline.
• Implemented a modular destruction system using 3ds Max Morpher, driving realistic part separation (bumper, hood, lights) on impact.
• Re-tuned the vehicle across multiple map redesigns, holding consistent handling behaviour as the environment changed underneath it.
• Real-time vehicle physics, custom rigs and per wheel environment response: the closest work in this portfolio to driving simulation.
FREELANCE WORKS
RALLY PROJECT
04/2026
Open-environment driving prototype on Unreal Engine 5. Spline-driven procedural generation and multi-view real-time instrumentation.
Role: Procedural systems and rendering
A client wanted several live camera angles on screen at once.
The first implementation couldn't hold framerate.
The obvious approach is also the expensive one: every extra active
camera is another full render pass, culling, shadows, post-process, the lot.
So I rebuilt the system around Scene Capture 2D components
writing to render targets:
Each secondary view captures to its own render target, composited in UI
Capture rate decoupled from game framerate, a rear view doesn't need 60fps
Show flags trimmed per capture: no shadows, no post-process, no fog on secondary views
Capture resolution scaled to actual on-screen size, not full res
Where it landed: ~13ms frame time with every view live inside the 16.6ms 60fps budget, with headroom.
Still render-thread bound though: draw sat at 12ms of that 13. If I picked this up again, that's exactly where I'd go instanced static meshes and merged materials on the secondary captures to cut draw call submission.
The thing I keep relearning as a Technical Artist: most performance problems aren't "make the renderer faster." They're "stop rendering what nobody is looking at."
Prototype visuals, no art direction on this one the only thing worth looking at is the frame time.
LASTMEAL / PLAYSTATION 1 GAME
07/2026
A fishing game for the original PlayStation, running on real 1994 hardware. Built in Unity with PSXSplash, gameplay scripted in Lua.
Role: Real-time art, technical budgeting and optimisation
Fishing, but not the relaxing kind. You fish in a heavy, quietly horrific
atmosphere, and the whole thing runs on an actual
PlayStation 1: 33 MHz, 2 MB of system RAM, 1 MB of VRAM.
The pipeline is Unity for scene authoring, SplashEdit for export,
the psxsplash runtime on the console itself, Lua for game logic.
That part is solved. The toolchain compiles, packs VRAM and
builds the disc image.
What no toolchain decides for you is what fits.
That is the actual work on this project.
Every scene is budgeted to show as much detail as the hardware allows while holding a stable 40 fps on original hardware:
• 2,000 triangles maximum per scene. Models built in Blender to the polygon, with the triangle count treated as a design constraint from the first vertex rather than a cleanup pass at the end.
• Texture atlases at 256 x 256, sized against what VRAM can actually hold once the scene is resident.
• Detail spent where the player is looking and stripped everywhere else, scene by scene rather than by a global setting.
None of this is complicated once you know the platform and know your budgets. It is surgical, though, because there is no headroom to absorb a mistake. On 2 MB of RAM, one texture too large is not a slowdown, it is a scene that does not load.
Runs on original hardware, not on emulator.
MOVIES CGI
2024 – ongoing collaborations
Real-time cinematic production in Unreal Engine 5. Sequences delivered to theatrical exhibition on fixed production deadlines.
Role: CGI Artist, Real-Time Cinematics
Feature film work for director Aga Cieutat / Isard Film Production, collaborating since June 2024.
Real-time CGI shots produced in Unreal Engine 5
• Owned the full chain independently: asset preparation, scene assembly, lighting, VFX, rendering and delivery to the edit. No pipeline handed to me, no technical supervisor above me.
• Worked to film production deadlines and to a director's brief rather than a spec, matching CG shots to plates that were already shot and locked.
• Real-time rendering used as a production tool, not a compromise: iteration in engine, lighting adjusted and re-delivered in hours instead of days.
• Screened theatrically in France, CGR Lescar, 2026.
ARCHITECTURAL VISUALISATION
2023
Two commissioned projects for an architecture practice, 2023. Both produced in Unreal Engine 5, lit with Lumen, dressed with Quixel Megascans and delivered as still renders.
PROJECT 1 - PRIVATE HOUSE
The practice supplied the house as an ArchiCAD export, along with plans, site photographs and sun position data for different times of day. The export was unusable as delivered: broken geometry, no clean topology, no UVs, no materials. I rebuilt it in Blender, retopologised, unwrapped and assigned materials, then brought it into Unreal Engine 5.
I built the surrounding environment from the site photographs so the house would read correctly on its actual plot, and set the lighting from the practice's sun data to match the times of day the architect wanted to present.
Delivered as three still renders. The building permit was filed with these images and granted.
PROJECT 2 - BALCONY REMOVAL, TOWNHOUSE
The owners were considering removing an existing balcony and wanted to see the result before committing.
The CAD file was in the same state as the first, so I visited the property, shot my own reference and corrected the model by hand against it.
One render was enough to settle it: seeing the facade without the balcony, the owners chose to keep it. The work was never carried out.
Available for full-time roles — contact me at fran6pereira@gmail.com
UE5 · Unity · Python · Blender · C# · Console optimisation · Pipeline automation · Virtual production