Lóránt Mikolás

Hi! I’m a Software Engineer working in the games industry. I have just moved to Tokyo for my next adventure. I used to be at Infinity Ward’s Tech Art department (Activision) in Los Angeles working on various applications and improvements to the pipeline for the Call of Duty franchise.

I have a Master’s in Computer Graphics and Game Technology from the University of Pennsylvania and a Software Engineering degree from Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires.

Aunque tengo formación técnica, crecí en un entorno creativo y artístico que influyó enormemente en mi formación. Me esfuerzo por combinar tecnología y arte para crear herramientas y gráficos increíbles que puedan servir a desarrolladores, artistas de efectos visuales, animadores y más.

(Please reach out to email for latest CV)

GDC 2025 Talk

Machine Learning Summit: Enhancing Development with LLMs and Multimodal Retrieval in ‘Call of Duty’

Special acknowledgment to Sean Comer (Principal Machine Learning Engineer) and IW Engineering team!

Conference link (also available in GDC Vault)

Credited in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (Software Engineering at Activision – Infinity Ward, 2024)

Designed and implemented new game machine learning based game development tools. Created innovative AI workflows.

02/2025 – Certification Stanford Online’s Reinforcement Learning Course. Covered a variety Topics including: Deep Q- Learning, Armed Bandits, RLHF, among others.

Credited in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (Software Engineering at Activision – Infinity Ward, 2023)

Worked on building and adding new features to the proprietary tools used by the environment art and character art teams.

Recieving the award from Dr. Vjay Kumar (Dean of UPenn SEAS) and Dr. Stephen H. Lane (Director of UPenn CGGT)

UPenn Academic Achievement Award

In May 2023, I recieved the “Outstanding Academic Achievement” award from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science for my academic performance.

Credited in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (Technical Art Internship at Activision – Infinity Ward, Summer 2022)

I got the opportunity to work on the Call of Duty franchise ahead of the release of Modern Warfare II (2022) before joining the team as a full time Tools Engineer.

Applying my graphics knowledge, developed tools for other artists to create environments and manage assets. Simplified various content pipelines.

*Screenshots from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II landing page*

PBR Pipeline (GGX/Trowbridge-Reitz)

Implemented the PBR Unreal Engine 4 pipeline on Qt application with OpenGL (GLSL) based on this paper Real Shading in Unreal Engine 4.

Specular sphere inside an environment map

Tangent Space Optimization of Controls for Character Animation Maya Plugin (MEL and C++)

Based on this Siggraph Disney Research paper from 2019, the plugin allows to edit the interpolation of the animation in between key poses without adding new ones by optimizing the tangents at the key frames.

For this, a Mosek Solver was used to minimize an energy function that satisfied specific constraints.

*Walk cycle editing with plugin viewport curves*

*The user can drag points in a joint trajectory between key poses to make the joint pass throught a different position*

Monte Carlo Path Tracer on Shader (C++ and GLSL)

Real-time interactive Monte Carlo Path Tracer on shader with support of transmissive, specular materials and environment maps.

Markerless Motion Capture Research

I researched markerless motion capture by tracking points of interest using DeepLabCut neural networks (CNN). The interest points captured by eight cameras simultaneously were then triangulated in 3D space with Python.

*Triangulated footage of markers, red spheres represent the camera positions*

L-System Procedural Forest Generation Maya Plugin

Allows artists to easily create forests based on different L-System grammars. Other modifiable parameters include: angle, step size, radius and more.

*Single tree generated by the plugin in the Maya viewport*

CPU-side Multithreaded Monte Carlo Path Tracer Global Illumination (C++ and GLSL)

Supports a variety of material BRDFs such as microfacets, Oren-Nayar and transmissive materials like glass.

*Room with Avatar art behind glass test render*

Maya Lite App (C++ and OpenGL)

Mesh editor with an underlying half-edge data structure. Worked on features like Catmull-Clark Subdivision for smoothing, skeleton binding and skinning functions.

Crowd Behaviours based on Reynolds Steering (GLFW, C++ and OpenGL)

Developed character controllers based on “Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters” paper from C. W. Reynolds.

*Crowd walking with alignment behaviour*

Forward/Inverse Kinematics Unity Plugin (C++ and C#)

From scratch FK/IK algorithms including Limb-based and Cyclic Coordinate Descent IK with Unity integration.

*Walk cycle adapting to terrain inclination for realistic foot placement*

Image Processing Tool (Python and PyQT)

Created an image processor in Python with a wide range of tools, including: Gaussian blur and noise, Reyleigh noise, anisotropic diffusion, Canny edge detection and more.

3D Rasterizer

Implemented a CPU- side 3D rasterizer from scratch in C++ with Qt interface as a part of a Computer Graphics course.

The rasterizer has a controllable virtual camera.

JP Morgan CODE FOR GOOD Competition 1st place

Integrated mobile and web application with the goal of helping people in vulnerable situations to enter the working market.

*With my team in the JP Morgan offices in Buenos Aires, Argentina*

Unity Online Game Connection Framework

Implemented the base code to allow for online gaming in Unity (C#) with UDP sockets. Took into account snapshot interpolation, prediction, jitter and data compression.

*The project had spaceship placeholders as the player character.*

Please feel free to reach out!