Ilya Kurkin

Designed, built and shipped a Roblox game from scratch in two weeks, top to bottom on my own production pipeline and AI tooling. Built solo as proof of the velocity that pipeline would deliver inside a team.

• Full pipeline ownership: concept to 3D to engine integration in Roblox Studio (Luau), matchmaking, mobile controls, telemetry.
• AI tooling threaded through the asset generation and iteration loop.
• Launched on Roblox, playable today.

Founded Omni Avatar, a cross-engine avatar identity layer for Unity, Unreal and Roblox. Hit MVP, raised seed via the Polkadot Treasury Child Bounty, ran the company about a year. Paused early 2026 when the ecosystem thesis stopped making sense.

• Hit MVP and raised seed via the Polkadot Treasury Child Bounty program (two funded six-month milestones).
• Set technical direction and product vision across the year of operation.
• Designed all 3D avatar assets: modeling, rigging, skinning, cross-platform optimization.
• Built the product solo across 3D production, web development and product design.
• Paused cleanly when the market thesis shifted, rather than burn the remaining runway on a plan I no longer believed in.

Senior 3D Technical Artist on Sortium's AI Face Generation tool, plus broader pipeline work.

• Built the AI face-generation pipeline: live face → game-ready 3D head with rig-ready topology.
• Tightened the face-generation workflow and the asset pipelines around it.
• Mentored the team on the technical practices that came out of the work.

Built a modular environment pipeline in Unreal Engine that solved texel-density issues and brought draw calls down on the large environment assets.

• System of mini-modular parts with minimal materials, designed to compose into larger assets.
• Built the pipeline from scratch after researching where the texel-density and draw-call costs were actually coming from.
• UV atlasing strategy to keep the texture memory inside budget.

Led a team of 3 artists at a Web3 gaming platform. Built the character pipeline and the documentation around it.

• Cut character asset production time from two weeks to five days by restructuring the pipeline.
• Wrote the technical documentation so the team could land consistent asset quality without me in the loop.
• Managed team workload, gave technical guidance and art direction.

Small startup team. Handled 3D modeling, animation, and the technical development around it.

• Cut 3D model production costs by 60% through reusable asset systems and tighter workflows.
• Built an LOD system that landed a 20% game-performance gain.
• Wrote custom shaders for efficient material usage across the projects we shipped.

Made limited-edition 3D NFT collections that ended up in digital exhibitions across Europe. The work split between artistic side and the technical optimization the blockchain platforms needed.

• Built generative collections with character parts designed for procedural generation.
• Did art direction and produced marketing materials for the NFT projects.

Started commercial design work at 17, making content for online communities. By 20 I had a small graphic design and project-packaging studio handling four-figure commercial projects.

• Progressed from $7 illustrations to multi-thousand-dollar projects.
• Operated the studio with a focus on project packaging.
• Moved from 2D to 3D, which became the foundation for the rest of my career.