Ubisoft

Overview

I worked on Ubisoft Massive's Snowdrop engine on the DCC Tools team - a team responsible for the shared tools framework used across projects such as Star Wars Outlaws. The team maintained a cross-DCC ecosystem spanning Maya, 3ds Max, Blender, MotionBuilder, Substance Painter, and more, built on a common Qt-based architecture.

My primary focus was on strengthening the underlying framework by refactoring core systems, improving stability, formalizing class interfaces, and ensuring DCC-agnostic tooling such as exporters, validators, and deployment utilities worked reliable across products. I contributed to both architectual improvements and hands-on development across multiple tools and pipelines.

Project Details

Date Dec 2021 - Mar 2024
Role Senior Technical Artist - DCC Tools & Pipeline Framework
Team 1 Lead Technical Artist, 2 Senior Technical Animators, myself and one other Senior Technical Artist. Fully central team, plus Stockholm TA contact responsibilities.

The DCC framework had grown interwined over time, with tightly coupled modules and inconsistent public interfaces that made refactoring risky. CI/CD constraints - particularly the inability to run headless DCCs in cloud pipelines - restricted automated test coverage and complicated in-DCC validation. 

I led the architectual decoupling of the framework, replacing unnecessary inheritance chains with composition and standardizing interface conventions across core classes. I improved our DCC tools deployer and launcher systems, introduced clearer programming patterns, added targeted automated tests, and documented new expectations for structure and behavior. I also advocated for test maturity and reliable code practises within the team.

The framework became much more stable to work with; modular, and predictable for both internal developers and downstream game teams. Tool rollout reliability improved, and friction during maintenance dropped. The team adopted clearer coding standards, a stronger testing mindset, and more maintainable architectural patterns - reducing the long-term costs of developing, validating, and distributing DCC-agnostic tools across Ubisoft.

Key Contributions

  • Improved deployment
  • Framework decoupling
  • Pipeline improvements
  • Standardized interfaces
  • Stronger CI/CD and testing
  • Cross-DCC maintenance
https://www.massive.se/project/snowdrop-engine/