Zed Poirier

Currently contracted with Rust Ltd. as a VFX Artist on H3VR2, the highly anticipated sequel to Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades.

While working with a team of acclaimed VR veterans my focus has been on creating VFX with a muted-realist aesthetic, while breaking through mobile VR constraints to achieve performant real-time VFX for all our ballistic needs.

I'm building out procedural flipbook pipelines using Blender and Material Maker, packing multiple visual elements into single VFX cards to minimise overdraw, and baking bloom directly into textures to eliminate post-processing overhead without sacrificing on visual quality.

At Cloudhead Games I worked on various VR projects built for Meta Quest, contributing real-time shaders, gameplay-driven VFX, and pipeline tooling across production.

A highlight was implementing a multi-stage enemy respawn sequence that required coordinating between Art, Engineering, and Design to map game state transitions on a custom dissolve shader system. Precisely syncing material swaps, shader property transitions, and particle systems with each phase of the event.

On the tooling side, I built a normal map packing utility that merged a main and detail map into a single RGBA texture, helping to reduce the number of texture samplers needed in our character shader.

Due to our NDA I can't share visuals publicly, but I'm happy to walk through the work in detail during a call.

An exploration of shader techniques using OpenGL and custom rendering engines built with C++ and Python.

Using these handmade OpenGL renderers I've been experimenting with noise, raymarching, matrix transformations, and other techniques to produce visual effects using mostly GLSL.

These experiments also include attaching custom hardware, like an old DJ Hero found at a thrift shop, to control the parameters and explore low level hardware configurations. Some exploration of basic VR controller implementations is also an active area of interest.

A micro narrative game about a sheep looking for her family. Playable in browser over on Itch.io:

This game jam style self imposed challenge took place over one week in January 2026. Using the Godot game engine I tried to build out this tiny game with a hint of narrative.

After a rough year, being hit by a round of layoffs, creating this game was a way to process some big emotions. I truly believe in the power of games as a form of artistic expression. Our passions can always guide us forwards.

EAT BANANAS. GO FASTER. FIND FAMILY.

At Boss Music Games, I focused on gameplay-driven VFX and technical art solutions that strengthened combat readability, impact timing, and player responsiveness.

Working closely with design and art stakeholders, I built stylized real-time effects and shader logic that solved clarity challenges while staying within strict performance budgets. This project best reflects my approach to balancing visual impact, iteration speed, and production-conscious implementation.

A VR Tetris clone in its full cylindrical glory.

Received a small funding grant from the CMF to build out this prototype.

This experiment was a proof of concept aimed at solving the complex problem of bringing the 2D classic into a fully immersive VR experience. Built with the Godot game engine, with a focus on minimal gesture based controls.

A visual novel style project focused on Canadian politics with a comic book aesthetic.

Combined a variety of custom shaders and full screen effects to push the visual quality. Examples include a custom outline system, a page turn effect, and a custom character shader.

Cozy, cute, and chill game made with Unity.

Created a variety of bespoke shaders and visual effects to enhance the environments of the game world.

Such as, the custom hatchtone shader to all 3D elements, a ice shader with a faux depth effect, and a grass painting system that hooks into Unity's Polybrush toolset seamlessly for vertex painting grass into the world.

At BattleGoat Studios I contributed technical art and shader work to Galactic Ruler, a sci-fi grand strategy title and spin-off of the Supreme Ruler franchise.

A personal highlight was authoring a 4D noise-based shader to animate a seamless, continuously flowing 3D star surface for celestial bodies, a technically delightful math problem that required thinking carefully about how noise functions behave across four dimensions to avoid visible tiling or repetition.

I also implemented VFX trigger systems directly in C++ within BattleGoat's custom proprietary game engine, and researched art pipeline workflows for integrating art assets into their production environment.

A college capstone project back in 2019, where I lead a team in creating an assymmetrical local multiplayer VR game.

One player uses VR to explore the haunted house and uncover the mysteries, while the other player uses mouse and keyboard on the same PC, to haunt, stalk, and kill the intruder to its domain.

I was responsible for team management as well as the bulk of the coding on the project. I kicked off the project by completing a functional prototype using the HTC Vive headset and Unity to prove that an assymetrical setup on a single PC was viable.

A physics based plinko game clone where a tumbleweed travels across different lands by the power of the wind.

Created with Google Blocks, 3DS Max, and Unity. The tumbleweed was modelled in VR as an experiment.