I'm Daniel, I work as an Unreal Engine developer, with a strong knowledge of all Unreal Engine systems, but with a focus on problem solvings and logic through C++, Blueprint and Editor Scripting.
I work on most mediums in Unreal, inc extensive work in Virtual Production for Film & TV, Headset based VR and AR, and video games.
I am currently working as a freelancer.
Just here for clarity, I'm absolutely not an artist. 100% a developer.
I have been working in Industry for a decade now, and using Unreal Engine for slightly more than that. In that time I have worked across film & TV, video games, theatre and more.
I initially started with UDK , where I found the passion for game development, then started using Unreal Engine 4.6 in industry in 2012, and used Unreal Engine practically every work day since.
I started work in the industry at The Imaginarium Studios , in 2012, where I worked for almost six years on a large number of fantastic projects. I was focused mainly on performance capture, and utilising game engines to further the motion capture industry. I worked on lots of games, films, TV shows, music videos, and other miscellaneous projects there. Since the Imaginarium was a fairly small company, myself and my very talented colleagues covered many roles to ensure projects were the best they could be, and allowed me to gain many useful skills not limited to a single role. Epic did a great write-up of the work myself and others did on the Tempest which can be viewed here, Unreal Engine Brings Virtual Character to Life Onstage in The Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest . There is also a white-paper on motion capture, featuring much of the work on the Tempest, here, Choosing a real-time performance capture system.
From June 2017, I started working at The Third Floor Inc , London branch. The Third Floor specialises in Pre-Visualisation, and I worked within the R&D department to develop Unreal Engine tools and pipelines to facilitate it's adoption in the film pipeline. This included new virtual production tools utilising virtual reality and augmented reality to bring a new dimension to the virtual production toolkit. I have also assisted the Immersive department on many occasions in developing more experimental or XR related projects, including production of their own game, Mad Factory VR. The VR tools that I created at the Third Floor have received a great write-up by Epic Games, and can be viewed here: Game of Thrones Previz using Unreal Engine 4
From September 2019, I started work at The Royal Shakespeare Company as the Lead Developer for their Audiences of the Future project. This project is ongoing and more details will be revealed as it becomes publicly available.
Yes! I have a mix of tutorials, the short tutorials and snippets are free, and the full courses are just a few £ on Udemy:
I have been using some development time to produce high-end assets for the Unreal Marketplace. As I have been doing Unreal for quite some time its a great platform to grow a portfolio of products. I try to maintain a high bar for quality, and keep the assets up to date as the engine matures. I have also found it's another area which is great for learning new features
I love learning and developing my own content, the more challenging the more I will learn, and so the more I enjoy it. I am currently working on three different game-based projects, one in VR the other two traditional games, one of which is multiplayer.
The Vault . I have been working on this for quite some time. The Vault is a Unreal Engine tool to let you submit, browse, and load assets from a centralized location. Its useful for an individual to trade assets between projects, but its real benefit is for flexible teams that move between projects a bit more regularly than traditional games departments. Film, TV, and Arch-Vis are key targets who will benefit from this. Being able to fully set up your asset, materials, blueprints, meshes etc, then submit it to the vault, then having easy access to this for you and the entire team from the vault loader in any project should make project prototypes faster than ever before. It also stores a plethora of metadata, and a thumbnail for ease of finding what you need. You can see a work-in-progress example at The Vault
Outside of development, which I do spend a lot of time on, I love to grab my DSLR and explore through photography. I'm also an avid gamer across all platforms, and I particularly love to explore indie games, to support the developers and research what others are making.
I also host a Discord server, both in support of my own products that are for sale, and for general community help, which has over 300 members