About

I'm Carlos De Almeida. Technical Art Director at Kluge Interactive and a creative technologist. I design, build, and ship the systems that connect creative direction with engineering execution.

I trained as a graphic designer and worked the print, branding, and motion graphics circuit in Venezuela for the first five years of my career. In 2013 I co-founded Rabipelao Studio, one of Venezuela's first animation studios, and ran its 20-person team for almost seven years. We produced Te lo Cuento, an animated series based on Venezuelan folklore, before the studio closed in 2019.

In 2020 I joined Kluge Interactive as a Junior 3D Artist and scaled through Lead Artist, Art Director, and Technical Art Director across five years. The work in that period covered VR titles (Final Fury, NDA projects, platform collaborations with Meta and Another Axiom) and the Nintendo Switch reimagining of Synth Riders.

Real-time graphics is most rewarding at the seam between art and code. I prefer to write the shader I'm asking the team to use, build the pipeline I'm asking artists to follow, and prototype the mechanic before designing the asset. Art direction earns its decisions when the technical scaffolding supports them.

When I take on a project, I default to: rebuild before port, prototype before polish, functional before visual. Failure inside that loop is cheap. Failure after the asset is locked is expensive.

Open source is my default where the work allows it. Blender is my primary DCC, and Godot is what I'm learning on my own time. I would rather understand the tool all the way down than rent a black box.