Nicholas Brancaccio
Graphics Engineer at Bonfire Studios
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Brancaccio is a graphics engineer with 11 years of experience building real-time rendering systems for games, web visualization, and engine toolchains. He has driven graphics features from low-level renderer design to editor tooling at studios including Unity Technologies (HDRP Spotlight team), Playdead, and Bonfire Studios. At Floored he authored a WebGL render engine (Luma) implementing PBR, deferred shading, advanced shadowing, order-independent transparency, and GPU profiling—pairing deep technical delivery with team leadership and artist training. His open-source contributions to Unity’s Graphics repo show hands-on fixes across HDRP, from decal gizmos to probe volume and batch-build issues, demonstrating care for production stability and build pipelines. Trained originally as a printmaker at RISD, he brings an artist’s eye to physically based lighting and material fidelity. Based in Oakland, he combines pragmatic engineering with visual craftsmanship to solve tricky rendering and pipeline problems.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Printmaking, Bachelor of Fine Arts, Printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design
Github Skills (12)
hdr10
script10
shader10
csharp10
editor10
render10
scripting10
graphics-programming10
editorjs10
dotnet-core10
unity3d10
hlsl9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
Unity-Technologies/Graphics
Aug 2018 - Oct 2022
Unity Graphics - Including Scriptable Render Pipeline
Role in this project:
Software Engineer
Software EngineerContributions:700 commits, 8 PRs, 65 pushes in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily worked on improving the Unity graphics pipeline within the HDRP framework. Their contributions include improvements to editor gizmos for decal projectors and bug fixes related to probe volumes. Furthermore, the user addressed compilation errors and provided fixes for issues arising during batch mode builds and reflection errors in HDRP, which demonstrates their involvement in the development and maintenance of the rendering pipeline.
renderpost-processingpipelinescriptableunity
pastasfuture/com.pastasfuture.kdtree
Nov 2020 - Jan 2025
Contributions:2 PRs, 12 pushes, 2 branches in 4 years 2 months
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