Luke Steichen

About Luke Steichen

Hi, I\'m Luke and I have been forging polygons into awesome characters since 2007!My favorite part of my career moving from individual contributor to lead has been, without a doubt, getting to create an environment where people get to put their superpowers to work. I love growing and mentoring my team, and I measure my success in their success. I never turn down getting to do hands-on work when I can, but I get the most joy out of taking care of the people I work with and manage. On top of being great at my job, I am also easy to work with, an excellent communicator, and a great teacher. I am passionate about learning new skills and expanding my horizons as a technical artist, leader, and game developer.Currently I am the Principal Technical Animator at Jar of Sparks, where I am the one-man-show at the heart of rigging, character and animation pipelines, and a lot of gameplay design support.Previously I was the Lead Technical Animator at Turn10, where I run the character, animation, and technical animation team. Before that I was the Technical Artist at Hardsuit Labs working on VtM: Bloodlines 2. My work includes rigging using custom and off the shelf systems, authoring tools for our team of animators and artists, implementing characters and props into UE4, authoring Blueprints, creating animation state machines, and the many other tasks involved in getting great looking characters and animations doing the right thing in Unreal.Previously I was at Sucker Punch Productions working as a Technical Artist on four inFAMOUS titles and their next big thing. My efforts at Sucker Punch were focused on character rigging, Maya node and deformer authoring, creating rigging and animation tools for Maya in Python, pedestrian community management, prop rigging, pipeline improvements and pinch hitting on any of the myriad tasks that can come up in a busy development team.I have had the chance to learn from many industry veterans and have worked with the latest pipelines and workflows. I continue in my pursuit of improving my deep understanding of Maya, the Unreal Engine, and content creation tools, bringing ever increasing levels of quality and craft to the characters, rigs, and tools I create.

Experience

1. Lead Technical Animator

   CD PROJEKT RED

   Jun 2025 — Present

Education

• Art Institute of Seattle

  Bachelor's Degree, Game Art and Design

  2006 — 2009

• Anatomy Tools

  Level 2 Anatomy Sculpting Course, Anatomy and sculpture

  2015 — 2015

Skills

• Zbrush
• Low Poly Modeling
• Art
• Python
• Hard Surface Modeling
• Photoshop
• 3d Modeling
• Environment Art
• Texturing
• Sculpture
• 3d
• Animation
• Adobe Photoshop
• Video Games
• Sculpting
• Digital Sculpting
• Mudbox
• Game Art
• 3d Studio Max
• Maya
• Unreal Editor
• Rigging
• Model Making
• Game Development
• Life Casting
• Uv Mapping
• Ps3
• Unreal Engine 3
• Unreal Engine 4
• Texture Painting