Matin Esmaeili

I'm a graphics programmer and technical artist. Most of what I build lives at the point where rendering, simulation and interaction meet — a compute shader that has to feel like snow underfoot, an electron beam that has to be physically plausible and readable in VR, a robot that has to move when you speak to it from inside a game engine.

What I work on

• Rendering & GPU compute — Unreal Engine global shaders, Render Dependency Graph passes, persistent GPU simulations (snow, sand, wave propagation) and the material plumbing that gets their results on screen.
• Technical art — shaders, Niagara systems and artist-facing tools that turn a programmer task into a drag-and-drop one.
• XR & digital twins — multiplayer VR/AR replicas of real equipment and places for training and inspection, on Meta Quest 3.
• Robotics & AI — driving real robots from game engines, with local speech recognition and LLMs on an NVIDIA DGX Spark.
• Virtual production — LED-wall content in Unreal, motion capture and studio lighting control at LSU XR Studio.

How I work

I like to understand systems from the source down. My GPU work is written against the Unreal Engine source rather than tutorials, and I document it so that other people can rebuild it — several of my plugins ship with chapter-by-chapter guides explaining every decision.

The maths matters to me as much as the engine. Dot and cross products, projections, sampling, numerical integration and stability conditions show up in almost everything here, from early Unity prototypes to the wave equation inside the sand simulation.

Background

I started with Unity and C# — games, procedural tools and architectural walkthroughs — before moving into Unreal Engine C++, shaders and GPU programming. Today I work across Unreal, Unity and Godot at LSU, on digital-twin research, virtual production at the LSU XR Studio, and team game projects, including the multiplayer racer Verocity, released on Steam.