I build real-time graphics, AR/VR/XR, and generative-AI creative tools.
Senior software engineer and technical artist with 7+ years across real-time rendering, AR/VR/XR, avatar systems, and generative AI — building creator platforms and AI-powered content tools at TikTok, and immersive experiences at Framestore for HBO and global brands.
01 — Selected Work
Creator platforms, avatar experiences, and AI-powered content systems built at TikTok and Framestore.
Senior Software Engineer · TikTok · 2021–Present
An AI-assisted creation system for Effect House that turns natural-language prompts into interactive TikTok AR effects and mini-games. I developed agent workflows for asset creation, asset matching, scene generation, and automated effect assembly, and supporting evaluation/testing workflows to improve production reliability.
Senior Software Engineer · TikTok · 2021–Present
Core systems for TikTok's AR creation platform used by creators worldwide to build effects, filters, games, and interactive experiences. My work covered creator-facing production features across materials, prefabs, asset management, timelines, sound library, filters, and command systems, plus infrastructure that helped bring AI-assisted content creation into the tool.
Senior Software Engineer · TikTok · 2021–Present
Large-scale avatar creation and customization systems for TikTok's personalized identity experience. I built avatar asset pipelines and production workflows for appearance, hairstyles, accessories, makeup, skin tones, and other character content, partnering with designers and artists to bridge creative tooling with avatar production needs.
VR/AR Developer · Framestore · 2018–2020
'The Dead Must Die' — HBO's first Magic Leap partnership, a mixed-reality Game of Thrones encounter where Unity-built MR content and practical set pieces bring a wight ambush and White Walker battle into a King's Landing retail installation. I built custom shaders, materials, gameplay systems, snow/fire/ice VFX, vertex animation, and rendering optimizations, balancing cinematic visual quality with the performance limits of mobile mixed-reality hardware.
VR/AR Developer · Framestore · 2020–2021
An award-winning AR iOS and Apple Watch companion app for HBO, built in Unreal Engine 4, where fans discover a personalized daemon, unlock AR animations, complete wellness-inspired activities, and capture social content. I contributed shaders, UI/UX implementation, visual effects, and gameplay features that supported high-fidelity AR characters and the app's interactive daemon-bonding loop.
VR/AR Developer · Framestore · 2021
A real-time interactive cloudscape for Kenzo Digital's 'Air' at SUMMIT One Vanderbilt, rendering art-directed volumetric clouds and guest likenesses in Unreal Engine. I researched and implemented the core cloud shader technology, focusing on real-time volumetric rendering for a large-format installation.
Software Engineer Intern · 2018
3D content tools for BioDigital's cloud-based interactive anatomy, disease, and treatment platform. I improved the content-preview system by building particle systems, mesh interaction tools, and runtime optimizations.
02 — Demos & Experiments
Real-time graphics, GPU, shader, and interactive projects — many with source on GitHub or runnable live.
Demo Reel
A procedural real-time environment inspired by stylized desert worlds, combining generated terrain, fog, cloud shadows, scattered objects, ribbon shaders, particle motion, and post-processing into one WebGL scene. My focus was on shader-driven atmosphere and procedural content systems that made the scene feel art-directed rather than randomly generated.
A TypeScript/WebGL L-system plant generator built around formal grammar expansion, turtle-style branch construction, procedural randomness, and faceted geometry. I added animation and visual polish through wind motion, falling-leaf particles, and tunable controls for exploring different generated plant structures.
A procedural city generator that uses shape grammar rules to assemble buildings, roofs, balconies, pillars, trees, roads, rivers, and bridges across a noise-driven urban layout. The project connected grammar-based modeling with environmental layout logic, producing varied building forms and city structure from reusable procedural rules.
A procedural planet shader using layered noise to generate oceans, mountains, clouds, atmosphere, and lighting across a fully shaded WebGL sphere. I combined terrain classification, atmospheric shading, and surface lighting to turn noise fields into a readable planet material system.
A Babylon.js engine extension project adding stylized post-processing, rain/frost overlays, weather-reactive materials, optimized sky rendering, and a day-night cycle. The project reflects my graphics-tooling interest: extending an existing engine with reusable rendering effects and environment systems.
Software Engineer Intern · BioDigital · 2018
A real-time WebGL texture-painting tool I built for BioDigital's 3D anatomy platform, supporting painting on arbitrary meshes with or without UVs through an adaptive unwrapping workflow. The tool focused on interactive authoring for production assets, making texture edits visible directly on complex 3D medical models.
A group-built Unreal Engine 4 VR puzzle game where the player rotates a small controller-mounted cube to rotate the full world, reorient the environment, and discover clues needed to solve the space.
An Unreal Engine 4 online PVP prototype built around hidden opponents, spray-based reveal mechanics, direct combat, and last-survivor match flow.
A Unity/C# 2D platformer shooter made as my Sun Yat-sen University graduation project, designed and tested for stable play across PC and mobile platforms.
03 — Art & Craft
3D modeling, animation & rigging, painting, and photography — the artistic side behind the engineering.
A Kowloon-inspired 3D environment artwork focused on dense urban night atmosphere, layered architecture, signage, lighting, and composition. I created the scene using Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, and Arnold, with attention to modular detail, material breakup, and cinematic mood.
A Maya C++ modeling plugin based on the SIGGRAPH paper 'SecondSkin', letting artists sketch curve loops that are automatically surfaced into layered 3D volumes bound to an underlying mesh. I implemented the plugin workflow inside Maya, translating a research-style modeling method into an artist-facing tool interaction.
A procedural Substance Designer material study focused on fish-scale patterning, layered surface detail, color variation, and material response for close-up rendering.
A Houdini procedural environment experiment exploring a folding-city concept through modular architecture, transformation logic, and generated spatial composition.
Photography work focused on travel, landscape, atmosphere, and natural light. I use Lightroom and Photoshop for post-processing, balancing color, contrast, composition, and detail while keeping the image grounded in the original scene.
Digital portrait paintings made with a Wacom tablet in Photoshop in my spare time, exploring likeness, facial structure, lighting.
04 — About
I'm a senior software engineer and technical artist with 7+ years of experience across real-time rendering, AR/VR/XR, creative tools, avatar systems, and generative AI — I love working at the intersection of graphics engineering and creative technology.
At TikTok, I build for the global creator ecosystem: a Prompt-to-Effect system that turns natural language into interactive AR effects and mini-games, the Effect House AR creation platform, and large-scale avatar systems — spanning multimodal generative AI pipelines, real-time rendering, and content-creation tooling.
Earlier, at Framestore, I shipped immersive AR/VR experiences for HBO and global brands — custom shaders, VFX, and gameplay for the Game of Thrones Magic Leap experience and the His Dark Materials: My Daemon app, plus real-time volumetric cloud shaders for the Air by Kenzo installation at SUMMIT One Vanderbilt. I got my start in WebGL tooling as an intern at BioDigital.
I hold an MSE in Computer Graphics and Game Technology from the University of Pennsylvania. Outside of work I'm into photography, hiking, piano, singing, working out, badminton, and tennis.
Skills
Education
University of Pennsylvania
MSE, CGGT · 2016–2018
Sun Yat-sen University
BSc, Information & Computational Science · 2012–2016