Portfolio (click a title to jump to it)
Cartoony Fire - Modular Fluid Shader - Fireball - Hologram Shader - Cel Shader - Rig Cleanup Script
Fisherguy Rig - Shark Rig - Goblin Rig
Rig - The Fisherguy
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A cartoony humanoid, including IK/FK and squash/stretch. The base rig was created with Rapid Rig and expanded with controls for removable accessories. The Fisherguy's poncho contains bones driven by expressions such that it deforms fully when the arms are lifted up, but does not cling to the arms at rest. The animator may manually control jiggle on belts and the top of the poncho, or they may be driven by physics.
The Fisherguy and fishing rod prop are both available for download.
Animation by Adam Hartwell-Mejia.
Shader - Cel Shading
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A cel shader based on the techniques used for character shaders in Guilty Gear Xrd. Features include:
▪ Manipulation of vertex normals to improve shadow shapes
▪ Use of a "shadow bias" map to force shadows at steeper lighting angles in specific areas, like the brow and jawline
▪ Half Lambert diffuse model to give even lighting under a single directional light
▪ Vertex painting to control outline thickness and conditions under which the outline fades out (derived from depth testing)
A full breakdown of how I built this shader can be read here.
Rig - Hammerhead Shark
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A creature rig made for a fellow student. The body is driven by two IK splines while the fins have controls for waving left/right and laying down/standing up. Fin control groups can be quickly selected from the placement control.
Animation by Adam Hartwell-Mejia. Model by Eric Dickerson.
Particle Effect - Fireball
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A particle effect meant to emulate a fireball, meteor, or other burning projectile. I ran a fire sim in Maya Fluid and baked it down to a texture atlas to be animated in UDK.
The framerate is driven by a vertex color channel over the life of the particle; frames can be held when necessary. Here I'm slowing the last 5% of the animation to prolong the smoke dissipation.
Shader - Holographic Projection
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A shader meant to emulate the "busted hologram" look common in sci-fi games and film. Material parameters allow the artist to tweak with the color tint, scanline size, distortion intensity and frequency, etc. The scanlines are anchored in world space, giving the impression of a static projector as the object moves.
Character model by Epic Games.
Script - RigToGameCleanup
A script to speed up the process of cleaning a rig up for a game engine. Certain auto-rigging scripts can generate a single-heirarchy skeleton for use in games, but they often don't include cleanup utilities for deleting controls, utility nodes, unsupported constraints, etc.; and those which do tend to break if you change the rig in any way.
My goal was to provide the animator with a two-click utility to bake animation and reduce the rig to a clean skeleton and skinned mesh(es) for export. The animator selects any bone in the desired skeleton and optionally provides a tag for undesired proxy meshes before running the tool.
The tool currently lacks support for blendshapes, but I intend to add that functionality in the future as well as add batch-processing for groups of files. The script is available for download (v 1.0, updated 8/05/14)
Rig - Goblin
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A humanoid rig made for a fellow student. This was my first experience using rigging scripts. In addition to the biped rig, I included jiggle bones for the loincloth, belly, ears, and earrings.
Animation by Adam Hartwell-Mejia. Model by Connor O'Donoghue.
Shader - Modular Fluid
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A multipurpose shader for fluids. Instance parameters allow the artist to control color, texture, reflectivity, transparency, speed, etc.
My goal was to make this as versatile as possible; I was curious if a single shader could be used to represent water, lava, tar, ice, and sludge. I wanted to use as few texture maps as possible; two texture maps and one texture render target are used for tesselation vertex displacement, normals, and real-time reflection.
Particle Effect - Cartoony Fire
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A particle effect meant to emulate a hand-drawn, cartoony flame, similar to the style of games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
I originally discovered UV distortion while following Doug Holder's realistic fire tutorial and put it to good use here. Both the flame flicker and the spiral smoke effect come from UV distortion. Three texture maps were used: one for the flame, one for the distortion, and a utility texture for the some masking effects.
The flame's properties are drivable either through the particle system or parameters in the material. The intensity, scale, and speed of distortion can be tweaked to emulate both small and large fires, for instance.
