Guthrie B Adams III

• Umbra Research and Engine Integration: I led research and development into alternative uses of CPU occlusion culling beyond rendering, developing proposals and prototypes to evaluate those applications. I also led Umbra integration for O3DE, including an abstraction layer for alternate occlusion-culling implementations, geometry extraction, asset-builder integration, and sample-project optimization. I supported Unreal Engine plug-in integration and remote data-baking workflows with Deadline Cloud.
• Application Security Guardian: I promoted secure development practices, provided engineering guidance, and collaborated with security specialists throughout the software development life cycle.
• Atom Leadership and Engine Integration: I led the team responsible for integrating Atom's rendering capabilities with the engine, editor, and production workflows. I set priorities, delegated work, reviewed designs and code, and implemented systems across team boundaries. I worked with rendering, UX, technical art, physics, animation, tools, and core-engine teams to connect authoring with runtime behavior. I designed component adapter patterns that reduced boilerplate and standardized reflection, scripting, automation, and testing, then worked with principal engineers to establish those patterns in the core framework.
• Material Canvas: I initiated and led Material Canvas, writing the RFC and designing its graph-based material and shader authoring architecture. I developed a JSON-driven node and template system that translated graphs into material types, materials, and shader source files. Users could extend the node library through data rather than editor-code changes. I extended Graph Canvas and Graph Model for standalone authoring and connected source generation, asset processing, and live previews so users could build and evaluate materials interactively.
• Material Authoring and Live Iteration: I led Material Editor's evolution into a document-oriented authoring tool and developed Material Component's in-level assignment and override workflows. I connected dynamic material slots, unique instances, reflected properties, and previews to the asset pipeline. I also resolved builder, dependency, and instance-management issues that affected hot reloading, enabling changes from authoring tools to propagate into editor scenes without restarting.
• Atom Tools Framework and Shared Infrastructure: I created Atom Tools Framework by extracting reusable document, viewport, property-editing, asset-browser, scripting, and automation systems from Material Editor. The framework supported multiple documents and views, undo and redo, persistent layouts, and extensible document types. It provided the foundation for Shader Management Console, Material Canvas, and additional prototypes, reducing repeated implementation work. I also built shared preview rendering for models, materials, lighting presets, and material overrides.
• Dynamic Vegetation and Procedural World Building: I led Dynamic Vegetation for New World and Lumberyard, owning the core design and most of the implementation while working with another engineer and a technical artist. I transformed an early prototype into a modular system for live, non-destructive world authoring. Shape-defined areas, selectors, filters, and modifiers gave artists control over placement and variation directly in the editor. I separated multithreaded sector evaluation from queued instance creation and removal, integrating dynamic placement with the renderer's main-thread requirements.
• Gradient Signal, Surface Data, and Terrain Foundations: I designed and implemented Gradient Signal to combine procedural noise, images, position, slope, and other inputs into reusable placement controls. I built Surface Data so vegetation could use supported geometry beyond terrain, including meshes, shapes, roads, rivers, and water. I created dependency monitoring that updated affected areas when users changed entities, assets, or configuration. These systems enabled interactive authoring and formed architectural foundations for the terrain effort I initially led before transferring to rendering.
• Editor Modernization: I redesigned the Entity Inspector and Entity Outliner with UX, replacing a monolithic property tree with component cards and improving multi-entity editing. I implemented dependency-aware guidance, component reordering, enable and disable controls, and contextual add-component workflows. I built ordering and caching support for predictable hierarchy editing, including drag-and-drop reparenting and reordering. These changes made entity composition easier to inspect and manage; I contributed as a named inventor to the related patent.
• Applied AI Exploration: I pursued ML and AI training and independent study of generative AI, contributed to technical education, and collaborated on experiments with small language models for real-time inference on game client hardware.

My major early editor, vegetation, and terrain contributions began in Lumberyard before the transition to GitHub. My public O3DE contributions under gadams3 document the later portion of this work.