Chris Sprance

Technical Art Director

Chris Sprance

Technical Art Director | Character TD | Pipeline, Procedural & Full-Stack Dev

Over 16 years of AAA and indie game development experience specializing in character technical art, procedural content systems, pipeline engineering, and full-stack development. I bridge the gap between art, engineering, and web - designing procedural workflows, architecting production tools, and leading technical art teams to ship polished characters and systems on time. Whether collaborating with engineers on gameplay or editor level tooling, building full-stack web applications to support live games, or solving complex character pipeline problems, I bring both deep hands-on execution and strategic leadership across disciplines.

Work

Red Storm Entertainment:

Associate Technical Art Director - (2024 - 2026)
  • Unannounced Fantasy Project - Designed a morph-based character creation system allowing a single armor or clothing piece to work seamlessly across multiple body types (Endomorph, Ectomorph, Mesomorph) using targeted morph targets per body type.
  • Unannounced Open World Noir Project - Collaborated with the Character Department to ship character updates, provided tools support, resolved technical issues, and delivered cinematic support.
  • Rainbow Six Siege - Led an 8-month production pipeline migration from JIRA to Flow Production Tracking (ShotGrid) alongside Diana Fitzpatrick, with the goal of making ShotGrid the single source of truth for all game content production. Implemented the ShotGrid Event Daemon, JIRA bridge, custom Action Menu Items, and custom daemon plugins. Built and deployed external web services to process data and orchestrate communication between JIRA, ShotGrid, and internal servers, enabling seamless automated handoffs across the full content creation pipeline.
  • XDefiant - Managed the SF Technical Art department, improved the character pipeline, and shipped MTX content across multiple seasons.
Character Technical Director - (2021 - 2024)
  • Led and managed the Character Technical Art team across multiple projects
  • Served as Pipeline TD, owning character content pipeline architecture and tooling
  • Managed multiple outsourcing partners, setting quality bars and reviewing deliverables
  • Reviewed and approved character art and vanity items for production readiness
Senior Technical Artist - (2021 - 2021)
  • Promoted to Senior Technical Artist. Continued owning character pipeline tooling and outsourcing support while transitioning into team leadership responsibilities
Technical Artist - (2019 - 2021)
  • Contributed to The Division: Heartland as part of the character and tools team.
  • Created tools and assets for Snowdrop.
  • Rigging/Weighting
  • Scripts
  • Performance Optimization
  • Created shaders
  • Characters
  • Supported outsourcing reviews and character asset integration
  • Wrote a ton of docs.

Entrada Interactive:

Lead Technical Artist/Art Lead - (2012 - 2021)
  • Shipped Miscreated on Steam
  • Helped design and implement many of the games core systems.
  • Managed the artists to ensure all members of the team had a task and understood their role and troubleshoot any issues along the way.
    • Used JIRA and Confluence.
  • Solved pipeline problems.
  • Created many of the game's assets including weapons, props, vehicles, vegetation, and creatures
  • Developed tools for animators, level designers and artists to solve common production problems and streamline their workflow.
    • Tools to automate the creation of LOD meshes.
    • Automate common CRYENGINE export setup duties within different artists DCC (Maya, Modo, 3DS Max)
    • Proficient with PyMel, Mel, MaxScript, and Modos python TDSDK
  • Maintained the Steam Inventory requirements to allow players to trade and sell items on the Steam Marketplace.
  • Created a localization system and helped translate large portions of the game to many different languages.
  • Developed tools and map visualization applications to catalog and analyze the world's design and art assets to allow team members to accurately get an overview of the worlds performance and quickly identify and solve any issues.
    • Used Python to create a system to parse game files and store metadata within a sqlite3 database.
    • Used Electron and Typescript along with Leaflet.js to design map visualization tools to display metadata on a 2d representation of the game world.
  • Maintained the loot spawn system within the game.
  • Maintained and created many of the crafting recipes within the game.
  • Created the vast majority of item icons used in the UI
    • Designed a system to automate the entire process using CRYENGINE and Pythons Pillow library.
  • Maintained official community Discord and wrote bots to help automate and prevent abuse as well as special features unique to our community, to help aid in the sharing of content and ideas within the community.
  • Helped create and maintain the company's social media web presence
  • SysAdmin to company's web servers.
    • Dockerized all services
  • Created company's official website
  • Designed and created game websites
  • Liaison to the company's various contractors
    • Worked with I3d and it's various data centers to help roll out patches, solve server issues and resolve common production issues.
    • Worked with Easy Anti Cheat (Now Kamu) to help solve any issues in production.
    • Organized, recruited and on-boarded the games many community dev testers.
  • Helped design, create and implement the games base-building system from an art perspective.
  • Created libraries and tools to interact with the games servers using XMLRPC via RCON
    • node-misrcon - A typescript library to send RCON commands
    • misrcon-cli - A python library to send RCON commands
    • MisRCON - An Electron/React/Typescript application to manage a custom server using RCON. Widely used by the community.
    • Miscreated web base server browser - A web based version of MisRCON in addition to a server browser.
  • Created web applications to track cheat reports and incoming game telemetry requests to help catch cheaters.

Marketing Provisions:

Web Developer - (2009 - 2010)
  • Created websites for clients using Joomla
  • Worked with clients to approve design
  • Created Federal Firearm License system to streamline the process for Carolina Custom Firearms
  • Created any graphics needed for website.

Freelance Web Developer/Graphic Designer:

Web Developer - (2009 - Current)
  • Contributed to open source projects.
  • Designed custom websites and applications for a variety of clients.
  • Billboards/Magazine Ads/Marquee Sign programming

Education

HGTC - Computer Science

Technical Skills

Production & Leadership

  • Technical Art team leadership and management
  • Outsourcing partner management and quality oversight
  • Cross-discipline coordination (Art, Engineering, Design, Production)
  • Contractor and vendor liaison (data centers, anti-cheat, QA partners, external partners)
  • Community building, moderation, and developer tester onboarding
  • Technical documentation authoring across multiple disciplines

Character & Art

  • Character Technical Art, Rigging, Skinning, Weighting, Baking, Texturing, 3D Modeling (Low/Mid/Hi Poly)
  • Shaders (HLSL, GLSL, Node Graph), Performance Optimization, Console Development (Xbox, PlayStation)

Procedural & Pipeline

  • Procedural content systems and workflows (Houdini, Houdini Engine)
  • Pipeline architecture, tooling, and automation
  • Outsourcing pipeline management
  • Production tracking and pipeline integration (Flow Production Tracking / ShotGrid, JIRA)
  • Version Control (Git, Perforce)

Programming & Web

  • Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, C++, Lua, GDScript, Rust
  • React, Redux, Next.js, Vue, Nuxt, Express
  • Docker, Kubernetes, Microservices, DevOps, SysAdmin
  • GraphQL, SQL, XMLRPC, REST APIs, Event-driven architecture

Platform & Game Systems

  • Steam platform integration (Inventory, Marketplace, Steam API)
  • Anti-cheat integration and game security tooling (Easy Anti-Cheat / Kamu)
  • Loot and spawn system design and maintenance
  • Crafting system design and maintenance
  • Base-building system design (art and technical perspective)
  • Localization system design and implementation
  • Game telemetry ingestion and cheat detection pipelines

Communication & Community

  • Social media management and content strategy
  • Discord community management and bot development
  • Graphic design for web, print, and in-game UI
  • Technical documentation and cross-team knowledge sharing

Software Proficiency

3D & Procedural

  • Houdini / Houdini Engine
  • Maya / Max / Mobu
  • Modo
  • ZBrush
  • Blender
  • Marvelous Designer

Texturing, Baking & Surfacing

  • Substance Painter
  • Substance Designer
  • Quixel Suite
  • Marmoset Toolbag

2D & Design

  • Photoshop
  • Illustrator
  • Affinity Suite

Game Engines

  • Unreal Engine
  • CRYENGINE
  • Snowdrop Engine
  • Anvil Engine
  • Dunia / Disrupt Engine
  • Unity
  • Godot

Pipeline & Production

  • Flow Production Tracking / ShotGrid + Toolkit
  • JIRA
  • Confluence
  • USD (R&D, pipeline research)

Debugging & Profiling

  • RenderDoc
  • PIX

Development Tools

  • Visual Studio / VS Code
  • Rider / PyCharm (JetBrains)
  • Electron
  • Node.js
  • Discord API
  • Emacs... lol just kidding

Version Control

  • Git
  • Perforce