Mackenzie Sampson

mackenzie sampson

Technical Artist & Software Engineer interested in shaders, rendering, and building artist-friendly tools.

I started out as a software engineer, building full-stack web systems, and I now apply that background to game development. I'm currently working on a few side projects in Unity to learn new skills and build my portfolio.

Exp

Professional

Founder & Pipeline Engineer

Feb 2021 – Aug 2025

PocketCaps ↗

Designed and prototyped custom keycaps in Blender and CAD, 3D printed them with resin, and built a headless e-commerce CMS platform, scaling it to thousands of customers.

TypeScript React PostgreSQL Blender OpenSCAD/Tinkercad

Technical Artist

Sept 2019 – Nov 2020

Electronic Arts

Optimized and automated asset pipelines across multiple FIFA titles by developing C# and Python tools, streamlining workflows for artists, ensuring smooth Nintendo Switch integration, monitoring builds, and guiding 3D artists through environment setup and debugging.

Python/PyMEL C# Maya Perforce JIRA

Compliance Tools Intern

May - Dec 2017

SAP

Developed an automated compliance tool for managing FOSS integrations that cut data entry time by ~80%, reduced errors by ~95%, and standardized workflows to accelerate audits and reduce legal risk.

Python Selenium Pandas

Side Projects

Blender 3D Procedural Keycap Generator ↗

Developed a procedural Blender add-on for parametric keycap generation with real-time profile and bevel controls, automated STL export and one-click export to multiple 3D printer slicing software.

Python Blender API 3D Modeling

Head Textures XL ↗

Fine-tuned a Stable Diffusion XL LoRA to generate texture maps for humanoid heads (proof of concept).

Python Kohya SS Stable Diffusion

Impossible Digimon Card ↗

Interactive holographic trading card with custom GLSL shaders, multi-layer parallax, stencil buffer masking, and view-dependent rendering built in React Three Fiber and TypeScript.

GLSL React Three Fiber TypeScript Photoshop

AI Short-form Video Generator ↗

Automated video creation pipeline using Llama 3 for script generation, Stable Diffusion for images, Tortoise TTS for voiceovers, and FFmpeg for video compositing. Built with FastAPI and Docker for scalability.

Python FastAPI Docker Llama 3 Stable Diffusion Tortoise TTS FFmpeg

E-commerce Headless CMS ↗

Headless E-commerce CMS with automated inventory managment, SEO optimization, and Stripe + shipping integrations.

Next.js React TypeScript PostgreSQL

Hobbies

Digital & Traditional Art