Julien Heijmans

Experience

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  Widescreen Games

  Dec 2007 - Mar 2008

  Junior 3D Artist

  I worked at Widescreen Games as a trainee 3D Artist, for a 3 month period.Worked on 3d assets (Modeling/Uvs/Textures/UnrealEngine3 shader).

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  WarmGun (Unreal Tournament 3 Mod)

  Aug 2008 - Feb 2009

  3D Artist
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  Lexis Numérique

  Sept 2010 - Oct 2011

  3D Environment Artist

  The game we were working on was unfortunately canceled, my task on this project was 3D artist.I mainly had to model apartments with 3dsmax using references drawn by our concept artist, paint the different texture maps, and export/import everything in the game engine (Modified Phyre Engine).New responsabilities: After about 6 months in Lexis Numerique, my responsibilities got wider, I had to work on different tasks including: Some work on fx, preparing scenes for upcoming motion capture, work with lead programmer to create a new, improved pipeline for environments, animations and animated props import into the engine, using a resource database and some sort of level-manager. Show less

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  ZootFly

  Nov 2011 - Apr 2013

  Lead Environment Artist

  I was first hired as an Environment Artist, my mission on this project at that moment were:-Create environment using the asset and texture library.-Light the scene, add fx (particles, fog, godray, flares, etc)-Work closely with the level designer and the art director.-Create scripts that are environment related (In a in-house language, close to c++)My first main task was to create the 1st art pass on the environment of several levels, using our library of prefabs and textures. The engine is developed in-house, and all the work is done in Autodesk Maya with a set of home-made plug-ins.This task include: Mapping, lighting, modeling, texturing, creating fx, creating some background animations, test on the different platforms and optimize levels to keep the frame-rate over 30fps at all time.After 7 months, the art team was split in two to work on different projects, I was at this moment chosen by our managers to take the position of lead environment artist (of a really small team) to oversee the second art pass and polish of all the levels of the game.With this role, I had to ensure that our team was respecting deadlines given by our producer and following the art direction. I also had act as a bridge between our team and the art director and the programmers to fix mostly visual or performance issues that we were facing, or improve some tools/features that we were needing. Show less

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  Io-Interactive

  Dec 2013 - Sept 2017

  Working as Environment Artist on Hitman, my tasks included: Figuring out level layout together with level designers and track owners, setting up everything to have a level that is nice to play, that looks good and that runs wells. Level design, optimization, framing and tech should be involved already at this stage.Creating whitebox geometry for said levels, including both terrains/architecture and props. Level setup (Scene creation, base setup of our occlusion system, base setup of our light probes) Writing down outsourcing briefs for level geometry, props and setpieces that will be produced by our outsourcing vendors. Those documents are sometimes simple and straight forward, but sometimes require meticulous planning and explaining to make sure that we get exactly what we want back from our vendors. Setting up a first pass of lighting, that communicates desired mood of the different locations in the game. They will be later worked on by our dedicated lighting artists. Setup of complex prop templates and setpieces using Glacier 2 visual scripting. Level optimization. Including drawcall optimization, checking material overdraw, LOD tweaks, reviewing props coming back from our external outsourcing vendors (LODs, Texture size, Material used), etc.Initial setup of some level gameplay-related scripts affecting environment or setpieces. Creation of some models, materials and textures from scratch. Creation of some VFX elements (Animated/interactive screens, cloth setup, etc.) Show less

  • Senior Environment Artist

    Jun 2016 - Sept 2017

  • Environment Artist

    Dec 2013 - Jun 2016
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  Unity Technologies

  Oct 2017 - Mar 2024

  Senior Technical Environment Artist

  As part of the Unity Demo Team I participated as Environment Artist on "Book of the dead" and "The Heretic" tech demos, working with art outsourcing teams making sure that the content matched the required quality and organization, polishing art assets, optimizing the content to make sure it run at target framerate on target platforms, I also made some scripts to process some scanned assets in Houdini, validated several rendering technologies in development at the time in Unity (High Definition Pipeline)I then joined the SampleGame team, where I worked on several unanounced projects and technologies.As a member of the SampleGame team I first participated in setting up an art production pipeline from DCC up to in editor, by making DCC scripts for 3DsMax, Substance Painter, as well as import scripts in Unity, and additional tooling to make production streamlined and allow quick iteration. And then actually producing art content for the unanounced/unreleased project, writing outsourcing documentation/training, orders and feedback (From concept art to final assets in editor), creating an outsourcing order pipeline so that several member of our team could prepare outsourcing documents with ease, and have a uniform package to send to outsourcing studios. As well as validating part of the outsourced content and polishing the received assets.Along the way I created shaders using Unity Shader Graph, as well as some VFX using Unity VFX Graph.I have also built many tool and pipeline prototypes in Unity, to be used in our internal production and to present suggestions to Unity engineers and product designers. Those were quite varied, it would go from pipeline and VersionControl tooling, to editor scene authoring tools (Scene asset placement tooling, spline tooling), or very specific tools or hacks solving specific requests.Finally, I have also worked with yet unreleased technologies, including terrain authoring tech, validating design decisions and implementations. Show less