Engines and Technical Art

Unreal Engine 5 - probably monsters project (cancelled)

At Probably Monsters I worked on the Tech Art team, working closely with artists, designers, and engineers. My work there focused on “Content” tech art - the management, relationship, and scalability of asset set ups - as well as procedural animation systems - look ats, orientation warping, IK foot (and shield and staff) snapping for bipedal and quadrupedal characters.

I worked closely with the Animation Team to improve their workflows and solve procedural runtime problems across an array of characters. An important goal of the game was to have characters with varying body sizes and types, while also maintaining set ups that were easily applied to new characters without reinventing solutions. I set up modular and flexible systems in Control Rig and Animation Blueprints that worked on characters with widely varying skeleton hierarchies.

I also worked closely with designers as they stood up new characters, solved unique problems, and handled the incoming assets. Working closely with both animators and designers as we prototyped new characters was an especially rewarding aspect of my work there.

Unreal Engine 5 - Project Wells (Cancelled)

At Crop Circle Games, I led the Tech Art team as we discovered how to utilize the newest technologies of the day. We dove deep into Lumen, Nanite, and World Partition and found new pipelines and workflows for artists that leveraged these amazing new systems, while also upholding the vision and methods of the artists.

As part of those new workflows, I helped establish import pipelines to take in and set up metadata on assets, to reduce the time artists needed to spend setting the same parameters over and over. I also wrote editor scripts to simplify or automate actions for the art team. For example, combining static meshes to a basic actor asset while maintaining the ability for artists to edit Custom Primitive Data was very important. I also leveraged asset import tasks to set up the appropriate retarget sources and preview meshes on animations, since we were sharing many animations and skeletons (to reduce the number of needed animations) this helped keep things clean in engine.

My individual contributions also focused on building and maintaining Animation BPs for all characters and creatures, utilizing a structure that was both flexible and sharable. Animations were exposed as variables for easy access by animators to create new locomotion sets as child AnimBPs, and I utilized stride and orientation warping rather than blendspaces to maintain better foot planting. I also set up IK foot snapping, foot syncing, curves for various features, and worked closely with animation and design to implement motion warping where needed. I also initiated and directed the construction of the animation pipeline from scratch.

Due to the abrupt cancellation of this project I was not able to get many captures of my work. But to better understand the scope and complexity of this project, you can view the work of some of our talented artists here:
Arman Abounourinejad, Environment Art
Chris Nirenberg, Character Artist

More detail on my contributions can be found on the Recruiter’s page for Tech Art and Tech Anim.

Oculus Quest

After the launch of Luna (see below) I worked on two different Oculus Quest titles. Both projects were shipped to the client/publisher, but were unreleased by them. In March 2020 I gave a Virtual GDC talk about making art assets for the Quest with performance in mind. The Quest has unique rendering challenges, and after digging into what was possible and what looked good I decided to put together a guide for artists who were new to the platform.
On my Quest projects I took on a more technical role, focusing on performance and the art overall. I developed shaders, created FX, made and maintained animation controllers, and adjusted the overall scenes to keep performance up. I was responsible for the establishing the modeling style, creating character models, rigs, and some environment modeling. I also contributed some C# code, largely for art importing and animation behaviors.

Unreal - ever Never - NEVERBOARD

My work for Neverboard focused on VR UI design and implementation, as well as general assistance optimizing the art for the Quest. I provided feedback and guidance to artists creating 3D assets for the games on optimized asset set up for the Quest, and handled importing a their assets and animations. I also designed implementations more difficult art pieces and FX and provided the Blueprints and Actors with easy hooks so the engineering team so they could use them as needed.
One of my favorite contributions to this project was a “3D 9 slice ” tool, written in Blueprints, which allowed other designers to quickly iterate on UI by providing a range of styles and the ability to adjust the size of “tablets” and “buttons” for the 3D UI. The set up largely involved shaders driven by vertex colors on specially set up meshes.

unity - Funomena - luna

For my work on Luna I was responsible for a majority of art and in-engine (Unity) art set up. I modeled and textured assets, often assisted in rigging, imported assets into engine, set up materials, created shaders, adjusted prefabs for functionality, created FX, optimized lighting, and generally maintained the look and functionality of the game across different scenes. While I didn't contribute code, I was able to read through C# scripts and find where problems were occurring, or understand better how systems functioned or utilized assets. 

See more at https://luna.funomena.com/

Unreal Engine 4 Rendering - IGG

These three videos are of "high poly game play" for advertising purposes. I took or created high poly assets and mocked up the game-play as closely as possible for trailers and cinematic shots. I adjusted environments from the original to increase texture quality and mesh density. Because the original game was not built in UE4, I also set up AI and animations blueprints for the characters so that they did not have to be manually moved around in Matinee in order to duplicate game play scenarios. I recreated most FX, and expanded the environment in many places. Rendering done in UE4.