Digital Doubles — Military Aircraft & Hardware

Context

I worked two digital doubles jobs back to back, Booz Allen Hamilton from 2018 to 2020, then Leidos from 2020 to 2021 after getting laid off from Booz Allen. Both were modeling for military simulation and training programs, building aircraft, hardware, and real-world tools to spec for the Air Force, Army, and occasionally NASA.

My Work

Booz Allen Hamilton (2018–2020)

• Modeled aircraft components and hardware for Air Force, Army, and occasional NASA simulation projects, including jet landing gear, maintenance tools, and missiles.
• Modeled and textured assets end to end in Maya, ZBrush, Substance, and Photoshop, then integrated them into Unity.
• Rotated across several different project teams over the two years, contributing a steady stream of aircraft and hardware assets.

Leidos (2020–2021)

• Modeled the EC-130 Compass Call and MC-12W aircraft from photogrammetry captured by a separate capture team. I cleaned up the scan data and rebuilt over top of it from scratch, matching real-world measurements and part placement.
• Sculpted in ZBrush where needed, UV’d, textured from scratch, and baked down from high-poly where required.
• Built for a training simulation used to let soldiers practice maintenance and emergency procedures on the actual aircraft.
• Set up the shaders for my own assets, plus additional shared shaders the team needed, like glass.
• Worked on the pipeline and optimization team: set up in-engine and source-asset folder structures, naming conventions, LOD counts and polygon budgets, and texture size limits.

Conclusion

Three years of building military hardware to spec, first in Unity at Booz Allen, then in Unreal at Leidos. The Leidos half is where I moved from being purely a modeler into owning part of the studio’s pipeline, standards, and shader work, the same pipeline-ownership role that carried straight into Vitreous right after.