Vas'Drakken

Benjamin Solheim
1216 N Edgemont St Apt #400                                                   Los Angeles, CA 90029

 (609)-384-6283 | ben@vasdrakken.com

http://www.vasdrakken.com/

Objective:

To find challenging and rewarding work in a dynamic environment.

Education:

Full Sail University

  Orlando, FL -  July 2008

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Animation

• Focus in Environment Modeling / Shading & Lighting

Ocean County College

  Toms River, NJ -  December 2005

• Associate in Applied Computer Science (AS.GE.CS.CSTT, CPE.GENERAL) 

• Programming, Databases, Photoshop, Web Site Design

• Student Government senator and representative to academic standard committee



Work Experience:

Volt (Activision QA LA)

•  QA tester for Activation's Modern Warfare 3 and Elite marketing website.

• Found critical bugs.



Primerica

 Finaical Advisor April 2011 – Aug 2011

• Helping People save and make money

• Finding Ethical ways to to improve wealth



Zoic Studios

 Intern / Artist January 2010 – June 2010

• Transporting Digital Media, between Studios in the greater LA area

• Built assets for production leads and producers, under short deadlines

• Kept my mouth shut about items under NDA

• Worked in the modeling discipline, shading and lighting, Textures and UVs, Animation for one small object, and rigging an intern project with SDK to mimic a rigged and weighted character that due to being hard surface and non-deforming could be cheated with a low over head rig.

Vizual F/X Studios LLC:  (January 2009 closed)

 Modeler & Texture Artist September 2008 – January 2009

• Responsible for translating 2D concept art into Polygon Meshes for use in Vizual FX's proprietary game engine, and for Xbox live title.

• Modeling & U/V Mapping in Maya

• Creating Zbrush-ready hard surface and organic low resolution Polygon Meshes

• Building and detailing high-resolution hard surface models in Maya for use as Normal Maps.

• Worked with both Realistic (MMO) and Toon Style (Cart Game)

• Proprietary game engine, and for Xbox live title.

Abbtech Staffing

 NMCI Project                                          

• Tier 3 Sweep Team / System Engineer

• Sweep Team dedicated to issues of the upgrade of the Navy and Marine Corp systems.

• Fixing network printer configurations and linking end-users to printers, syncing PDAs and email

• General desktop support such as recovery of corrupt files, fixing network configurations,

• Answering trouble-tickets dealing with difficult end users when their application did not work the way it did before the deployment.

Various Staffing Agencies

 Systems Engineer October 2001 – November 2005

• Systems Engineer, Information Technology Consultant

• Military/Civilian Projects, Roll outs, Site Surveys, Sweep Team

• Tech Solve Global: 10/2003 – 7/2005   System Engineer

• Mars Employment, Inc: 1/2003 – 5/2004   System Engineer

• Abbtech Staffing, NMCI Project: 8/2002 – 10/2005  Tier 3 Sweep Team / System Engineer



United States Air Force

 AAWSJ / Medical Admin / Weather Forecaster

 E – 4 Senior Airman July 1997 – August 2001

• Honorable Discharge

• DOD Secret Security Clearance

Technical Skills:

• Patience and logical able to resolve issues without getting overwhelmed or frustrated.

• Firm understanding of lighting and color theory

• Traditional Sketching on pads and doodling in Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro

• Polygon and NURBS Modeler with subsets in Environments, Texturing, Rigging and Scripting

• Familiarity with Maya and 3DMax’s modeling, texture and lighting systems.

• Effective use of transparency in creation of efficient foliage and fake windows.

• Maya application development - Mel Script tool development to assist in building complex objects.

• Integration of high and low resolution assets, from Maya, Max, Zbrush, C4D through object conversion and the use of FBX file format

• Understanding of Unreal engine optimization of assets.

• Geometry optimization for normal maps.

• Lighting and Shading optimization for Mental Ray render and game engine renders.

• Multi-pass rendering and composition using Diffuse, Specular, Shadow and Occlusion passes.

• Maya application development - Mel Script tool development to assist in building complex    objects.

• Integration of high and low resolution assets, from Maya, Max, Zbrush, C4D through object conversion and the use of FBX file format.

• Understanding of Unreal engine optimization of assets.

• Geometry optimization for normal maps.

• Patience and logical able to resolve issues without getting overwhelmed or frustrate.

• Creating efficient foliage rendering, both as paint effects and simple transparent plane.

• Mental Ray render optimization

• Programming & Scripting Background (Mel, C++, Assembler and Java Script.

Shorter form: Jan 2012