Campus Directory

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit Art Department

Title Continuing Lecturer

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Lecturer

Areas of Expertise Art
Digital Arts
Video Games, Game Design, Game Studies
Game Technology

Primary Office Location Digital Arts Research Center
302

Mail Stop Digital Arts Research Center

Biography, Education and Training

Ed has been teaching game students at UCSC since 2015 in hands-on digital art creation for video games. Much of his focus has been on instructing students in digital art through studio courses in digital painting, 3D modeling, texturing, rigging and animation. Having been a founder of two Independent video game companies(Santa Cruz Games and Boing, inc.), Ed started his work in the video game industry in 2000 with experience as a Senior Animator, Producer, Game Designer, as well as a 3D Generalist. During his time at those companies, he shipped over 20 titles on multiple platforms and devices for major publishers including EA, Activision, LucasArts, Disney, Marvel and Eidos for XBox, Playstation, PC, Wii, NintendoDS, and other proprietary hardware. He has a BFA from UC Santa Cruz and studied character animation with then Pixar Animator Jimmy Hayward (Director) and Character Rigging Independent Study with then ILM Technical Director Michael Ford (Sony Pictures Imageworks CTO) at Academy of Art in San Francisco.

Currently, he is also Creative Director and Director, Product Management at Tanzle, Inc., a software platform company that provides geospatial and relational context-maintenance solutions, including data integration, remote collaboration, content management, visualization and communication. As Big Data analysis and visualization is requiring more embodied interaction and experience, Ed has been focused on utilizing technology and techniques from game development into the data visualization and analysis vertical, to allow better cognition of big data problems through experiential interaction through simulation. Ed also works utilizing game technology towards generating synthethic data to train A.I. models for object detection and other purposes.

Ed brings his past and current experience and expertise to provide detailed technical instruction in game asset creation and pipelines, team building methods and strategies for independent game developers, as well as sharing his professional experience to broaden the horizon for students interested in game development and beyond.

Courses ARTG 118 - Character Creation for Video Games
ARTG 131 - 3D Game Art Production
ARTG 132 - Character Rigging and Animation for Video Games