Sibanesihle Shezi · Technical Artist · Johannesburg

I build real-time
graphics that have
to hit a number.

Frame time, file size, render budget, ship date.

Two years at Digital Union as the studio's only Unreal developer, building the render pipelines and tools the rest of the team works through.

Per-frame render time
45 min to 7 min
Render farm cost
Removed
World Defence Show
Feb 2026, shipped

Jackpot City

Casino and iGaming visual production · Digital Union · Unreal Engine 5

Problem
Campaign frames rendered out of Maya took around 45 minutes each, and the studio was paying for render farm time to hit deadlines.
Constraint
Compositing needed the passes kept separate, and Unreal does not output them. The art team had to keep working in Maya.
What I built
An Unreal Engine 5 render pipeline with custom pass extraction, a USD interchange between Maya and Unreal, and a crowd system that scattered civilians across the city set.
Result
About 45 minutes to about 7 minutes per frame. Roughly six times faster, and the render farm line item went away.

A hard output budget, a pipeline that has to hit it, and other people depending on the tool while I change it.

Viewport overview
Jackpot City F1 South Africa

World Defence Show

Saudi Arabia · February 2026 · Real-time interactive · Digital Union

Five themed environments across a tunnel of screens: land, air, sea, space, security.

I built the land and air mixed-reality environments, the security environment, the character-selection level, and the multi-display rendering setup the rest of the team output through. A real-time character mirrored visitors' movement on a large screen as they walked past it.

Fixed public opening date. Hardware I did not choose, in a venue I could not test in until late.

Real-time, on someone else's hardware, in front of an audience, on a date that could not move.

Renders and viewport overview
World Defence Show · Saudi Arabia

Offline Conversational Character

Unreal Engine 5 · Local inference · Unreleased

Problem
A character you can talk to, running with no internet connection at all.
Constraint
Everything local. No cloud API for the language model, the speech recognition or the speech synthesis. The reply also had to arrive fast enough to feel like conversation.
What I built
A local language model, local speech-to-text and local text-to-speech running inside Unreal, with facial animation driven from the generated audio and behaviour driven by a state machine. Ships as a 2D voice orb or a full 3D character from the same system.
Result
Runs fully offline. Speech in to speech out in 468 ms on RTX 3090 hardware.

A latency budget on fixed hardware, and one system built so the presentation layer swaps without touching the logic.

2D voice orb and 3D character

Unreleased work at my employer. Described in general terms, no client footage.

How I work

I write the document before I build the system

Every tool I have shipped has a written spec describing what it does and how to drive it, so the team uses it without me in the room.

I optimise to a number

If a project does not have a budget I ask for one, then measure against it. Render time, frame rate, file size, whichever one is going to be the problem.

I build for other people

The Jackpot City pipeline and the World Defence Show display setup were both used daily by artists who did not build them.

I was the studio's first and only Unreal developer

Everything above I worked out, then wrote down.

Let's build something worth watching

Email
sibanesihleshezi@gmail.com
Phone
+27 61 589 5165
LinkedIn
Sibanesihle Shezi

Johannesburg, South Africa.

Technical art and real-time rendering pipelines.

@shezitheartist

Studio Shezi (Pty) Ltd · Linden, Johannesburg