Nick Chavez

About

By day I’m a software engineer at Google Paris, where I work on the IMA SDKs, bringing video ads to web, mobile, and TV.

By night I’m an animator, selfhoster, game-maker, and HIIT-er. I love learning human and programming languages, plus I have a special interest in 3D graphics and computer vision. Below, read about some of the projects I’ve been working on. 😁

Posts and Projects

2022

Extending Metal-cpp to Other Apple Frameworks

C++ bindings for AppKit, CoreGraphics, and OpenGLES

AppleGfxBase

Advanced template for C++ Metal & OpenGL apps on macOS, iOS, tvOS

Compiling Metal Shaders

Compiling Metal shaders in a CMake or Bazel C/C++ project

2021

Blue Marble Explorer

Rendering Earth in 3D by crunching satellite imagery through compute shaders

Hex Strategy Map: Render

Procedurally rendering a Civ6-like 3D terrain via compute shaders

Hex Strategy Map: Design

Figuring out how to design a system for rendering 3D hex maps

2020

Procedural Planet Generation

Experimenting with spherical tessellation and procedural heightmaps and materials

Client-side Prediction Multiplayer

Client-side prediction, server reconciliation, and entity interpolation for realtime multiplayer

Jukeboxx iOS V3

A reactive Swift music library and streamer iOS app backed by HLS and Backblaze CDN

2019

Jukeboxx Web

A React-based music library and streamer web app backed by HLS and Backblaze CDN

Astrovan: 🎉 First Game Asset Launch!

Low-poly PS1-style 3D car model

2.5D RPG Demo

Retro pixel-style cel-shading in 3D

2017

Laser Frustration

3D animation featuring laser effects + booming soundtrack

2016

Trade/RPG/Battle Demo

A mostly faithful Pokémon Blue remake in C#

Waiter Duty

Replacing hors d'oeuvres waiters with robots

Spaced Out

College animation class final project featuring rubber hose cartoons + SBTRKT soundtrack

Wireless VR Headset

Combining Wiimotes with Google Cardboard for more accurate VR positioning

2015

A Survey of Light Estimation Analysis

Strategies for reconstructing 3D lighting conditions for a given image

Jukeboxx iOS V2

An iOS music library and streamer app backed by progressive MP3 Dropbox files

Microsoft Account for Android

Logging into keyboard-less devices with OTPs generated from an Android app

Uncle ACE

College animation class final project featuring OutRun aesthetics + Blood Orange soundtrack

Neat Freak

College animation project where clothes have a mind of their own!

2014

C++ OpenGL Physics Simulation

Visualizing planar and spherical collision kinematics with OpenGL and C/C++

Jukeboxx iOS V1

An iOS music streamer app backed by downloading MP3 Dropbox files

Animoto

Summary of sophomore year summer internship

Retro BrickBlast

A Breakout-like arcade game for iOS using SpriteKit

Tasker

An iOS to-do list utility app

2013

Qub Messenger

An iOS messaging app with rich profile anonymity granularity