An experienced Technical Director, Researcher and Lecturer currently working as a Senior Lecturer in animation and games technology.   I have a passion for supporting artists to realise their vision, I am happiest when developing new tools and approaches to creating art.

The diverse projects that I have developed over the past 10 years as technical director of the Games and Visual Effects research lab have provided me with a “very particular set of skills” that allow me to break down problems and develop innovative solutions.  To highlight a few projects:

  • A render farm from a skip full of computers and a £500 budget
  • Developing distributed data scrapers backends with restful apis to for data visualisation
  • Developing data clean-up tools in Houdini to import lego models
  • Building custom firmware to drive vibro-haptic headbands for Unity.

Through my Teaching and Masters degree I gained extensive knowledge of games development which I later applied as a developer and producer of several Virtual Reality projects for the New Creatives Project lead by Screen South and BBC Rnd.

My overall goal in life is to tread lightly upon the world and make the world a better place for others

Software Skills:

Houdini FX (RDB, Pyro, Pops,USD/Stage, Python, Qt / Pyside)

Unreal Engine 4 (Blueprints)

Maya (Rigging, Tool Design, Qt / Pyside )

Microsoft Office (Excel Daemon)

Teaching Portfolio:

Module Leader – Moving Visions – Cultural Contextual Studies for Games Art

Module Leader – Interactivity and Professional Practices for Games

Module Tutor – Advanced Specialisms in VFX – TD & Coding – Tool Design (Houdini)

Module Tutor – Advanced Specialisms in VFX – FX – Simulation (Houdini)

Module Tutor – Advances Specialisms in 3D – Rigging (Maya)

Module Tutor – Interactivity and Professional Practices for Games – Blueprints + Interactivity (Unreal Engine)

Senior Lecturer (Animation and Games Technology)

Technical Director (G+VERL)

Publications

Tree D.J., Malizia A. (2021) A Multi-planar Approach to Encoding Story Worlds for Dynamic Narrative Generation. In: Ardito C. et al. (eds) Human-Computer-Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12936. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85607-6_36

Tree D.J., Malizia A. (2019) Author-Driven Approaches to Computational Narrative Design for Games. In: Kurosu M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. Perspectives on Design. HCII 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11566. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22646-6_43

Tree, D.J. (2019) ‘Adaptive Narratives For Immersive Spaces’, in Paulsen, K.S. and Neill, L.O. (eds) Storytelling: Beyond the Screen, pp. 56–65.

Games and Visual Effects Research Lab

Technical Director of G+VERL

  • Virtual Reality Development
  • Scripting
  • FX Supervisor
  • VFX Artist
  • Developer