Faceware Studio & SDK

Scouted to do what the team no longer had bandwidth for: rescue a product line buried under years of tech debt and drag it into the modern era.

I rebuilt their core plugin suite — Analyzer, Retargeter, and MotionBuilder — from the ground up, migrating to modern C++, updating all third-party dependencies, and replacing an aging DirectShow pipeline with FFMPEG and OpenCV, delivering measurable gains in both performance and visual fidelity. What had been a maintenance burden became a foundation worth building on.

From there, I took their Live Server proof of concept and engineered it into a full commercial SDK — a true product line that any studio could integrate for real-time live facial animation. That SDK became the bridge to one of the most ambitious partnerships in gaming: a deep technical integration with Star Citizen, bringing live facial capture to one of the largest and most complex MMOs ever built.

The Star Citizen partnership also opened the door to hardware R&D — specifically a new low-light capture device that doubled as a webcam while delivering 60 FPS facial data capture in near-dark environments, ensuring fluid, real-time in-game animation regardless of lighting conditions.

Faceware is a hardware and software company, and my role sat at the intersection of both. My north star was always turnkey simplicity — making powerful capture technology intuitive enough that users could focus on performance, not pipeline. Studio and Shepherd were born from that philosophy: software built to communicate directly with Faceware hardware, automating and simplifying the hardest parts of capture and processing. Beyond software, I contributed to hardware iterations as well — headgear design cycles, assembly, third-party component updates, and live demonstrations showcasing the full interconnected hardware-software experience.

Came in to pay down debt. Left having built an entirely new product ecosystem.