J. Scott Hofmann
shofmann at mindspring.com
http://www.kniggets.org/

Experience

• Developed a graphics engine targeting the PC and Xbox 360 platforms used by the titles Darksiders: Wrath of War and an untitled massively multiplayer online game using the Warhammer 40,000 license.
  • Implemented high dynamic range lighting, depth of field, motion blur, and fog effects, and a configurable frame buffer post-processing framework.
  • Designed and implemented a content pipeline to process texture and mesh data into formats optimized for each target platform.
  • Developed a shader management system covering the complete lifecycle of every shader used by the games:
  • Most shaders are authored using a graphical shader builder with HLSL, Cg, and DXSAS (compatible with 3D Studio MAX 9). Shaders can also be authored using a text editor if more sophistication is required.
  • Shaders are cached at runtime - the caches are versioned in development builds and used standalone in retail builds of the game.
  • Began developing a Playstation 3 back end for the engine.

• Lead Programmer on the Unmanned Systems Test Bed program.
• Managed a team of four programmers based at the Maui High Performance Computing Center.
• Developed a novel approach to the integration of live telemetry into a synthetic environment.
• Developed a package for the real-time projection and alignment of video sensor data.
• Led the integration of several component software technologies including: TerreX's SOFViz, Multigen-Paradigm's Vega Prime, and Skyline Software's TerraExplorer visualization toolkits, the US Joint Forces Command's Joint Semi-Automated Forces (JSAF) battlespace modeling and simulation software, and the US Department of Defense's TENA communications middleware.
• System Architect and Lead Programmer on a rapid prototyping framework for the visualization and exploitation of terrain elevation data.
• Developed a DirectX 9.0-based graphics engine to support the display system.
• Implemented support for very large terrain data sets- that is, data sets that exceed the amount of available heap memory- via an out-of-core rendering system.

• Implemented an animated, reflective water effect using dynamic normal maps and environment mapping for the title Dark Age of Camelot: Shrouded Isles on the PC.
• Designed and implemented a new terrain texturing system for the title Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis on the PC, including all art tools necessary to create the blend textures and a pixel-shader-based runtime support system with a graceful degradation path ending at a multipass system using the fixed-function pipeline.
• Added support for normal, parallax, and specular texture maps to the title Dark Age of Camelot: Catacombs for the PC via the dynamic creation of vertex and pixel shaders.
• Designed, developed, and maintained several game development and art tools.
• Developed tools to display artist-generated assets in their in-game forms. These tools enabled the display of auxiliary mesh information such as the collision meshes, normal and tangent-space vectors, and allowed the artist to view the mesh using the in-game lighting and shading system.
• Developed a game zone construction tool used to manage all zone-specific files. It supported the generation and display of high-resolution terrain texture files in addition to the placement and orientation of all polygonal meshes on the terrain including buildings, foliage, and cultural features such as bridges.
• Developed a mesh texturing tool to support a new shader-based texturing system.
• Supported texture map types include diffuse, environment, gloss, detail, light, dark, decal, bump, normal, specular, glow, luminosity, and parallax maps.
• Extensively profiled the Dark Age of Camelot client application and the Gamebryo 1.1 middleware using Intel's VTune, Compuware's BoundsChecker, Microsoft's PIX for Windows, and NVIDIA's NVPerfHUD, and implemented targeted optimizations.
• Managed vendor relations with Numerical Design Limited, ATi, NVIDIA, and Microsoft.

• Senior Programmer on The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind for the PC and the Xbox.
  • Designed and maintained the collision detection and resolution system.
  • Managed the graphics hardware interface code on the PC and the Xbox.
  • Implemented several tools for the art team, including tools to visualize the game meshes in their in-game form and display auxiliary features such as collision meshes, lower level-of-detail meshes, and normal vectors.
  • Worked on the transition of Morrowind to version 4.0 of NDL's NetImmerse game engine
  • Beta-tested and debugged NetImmerse's DirectX 8 and Xbox renderer libraries
  • Researched the addition of DirectX 8- and Xbox-specific effects to Morrowind
    • per-pixel lighting, bump, environment, and normal mapping, water effects
• Project Manager, System Architect, and Lead Programmer on an internal research-and-development project developing the company.s next-generation graphics engine.
• Managed a team of three engineers.
• Designed and implemented the math, animation, and rendering libraries.
• Worked with NVIDIA's Developer Relations group to optimize performance.

• Senior Programmer on a U-2 aircraft optical sensor simulator system.
• Designed and implemented libraries to display VRML97 and MultiGen OpenFlight models, including a format-neutral image management class framework.

• Designed and implemented a visual editor used to create database queries, including a multi-panel display showing the query in a visual form, as a SQL statement, and as a result set.
• Maintained and improved the List Manager, used in the storage, manipulation, and display of tabular data.
• .Fixed platform-specific problems, answered questions, and managed production builds for the Silicon Graphics and Hewlett-Packard platforms.

• Implemented an isosurface generator for a chromosome visualization package.

• Ported the Epoch text editor from X-Windows to NeXTStep.
• Assisted in the development of the Sketchpad shared drawing tool.

• Developed a simulation of proton-antiproton interactions in an antiproton beam.
• Collaborated on a paper detailing a new method of generating medium-energy antiproton beams.

Skills

Languages: C, C++, Java, lua, Scheme, Pascal, Fortran 77, DirectX 9.0 Vertex and Pixel shader assembly, DirectX HLSL, Cg
Operating Systems: Windows 2000, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, MacOS, IRIX
Libraries and Frameworks: DirectX 9 and 10, Gamebryo 1.1, OpenGL 1.2, X11R6, Win32, MFC
Consoles: Microsoft's Xbox and Xbox 360 and Sony's Playstation 3
Clearance: Top Secret (inactive)

Titles Shipped

Titles In Development

Papers

"A possible method to produce a polarized antiproton beam at intermediate energies", E.W. Vaandering, H.M. Spinka, and J.S. Hofmann, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 351 (1994) 266-278.

Education and Honors

Thesis Title: "The Render Graph: A Data Structure to Aid in the Interactive Display of Scene Graph Data"

Dean's List, College of Engineering, University of Illinois, 1994.
Edmund J. James Scholar, College of Engineering, University of Illinois, 1990 and 1991.

Screenshots

The Dark Age of Camelot: Shrouded Isles water effect. Note the ripples in the water and the reflection of the buildings.

The Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis terrain texturing system. Note the high-resolution grass textures and the stone textures on the valley walls.

Darksiders: Wrath of War. Note the blooms from the high-dynamic-range lighting system.