The Anacrusis is a 4 player co-op shooter made in Unreal Engine 4. A spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead. Set on a 70’s retro-futurist space cruiseship overrun by hostile alien parasites.
I work on this as a tech artist. My main contribution has been on character rigging, tool development, material/shader work, and optimizations. And lots of bugfixing.
The Horde
One of my bigger tasks was reworking the shader used for the Alien Horde in the game. The original setup had separate materials for body parts and pieces of clothing, which made them each 5-7 draw calls and was extremely bad for performance. There were also only 15 texture variations, so a lot of repetition.
I managed to get it down to just 1 drawcall per alien, and thus nearly doubled the framerate in big fights.
I also vastly increased visual variety by creating a shader that procedurally picked a set of color swatches and clothing patterns.
Maya Tools
I wrote a couple custom tools for Maya using Python and Qt.
The first is a tool for automating the setup of our blendshape based FACS face rig. It had a lot of shapes and meshes making it incredibly tedious and time consuming to do by hand. The list of shapes is dynamic and loaded from a .ini file to make it easily extendible.
The second is a tool for improving how Maya manages vertex color channels, which are used to control a lot of shader effects.
I also wrote several other various small helper scripts that aren’t as interesting to show off.
Coolant
I helped prototype the Materials, VFX, and mechanics of an upcoming frost mechanic called Coolant. Enemies and players that walk into Coolant leaks will gradually freeze solid, and can be shattered into pieces when fired at.
Lucid is a Point & Click Adventure Game set in a small Norwegian fishing village. I follows Leif, a depressed middle aged accountant, who begins to discover lucid dreaming and uses it to solve the various problems in his life and within himself.
I was the 3D Lead and Technical Artist on this project. In addition to the typical Environment and Character Art responsibilities I was chiefly responsible for Lighting, Rigging, Shader Programming, and Optimization.
I contracted for Campo Santo to make Henry, the main character of their game Firewatch.
https://www.firewatchgame.com/
The basemesh and lowpoly was made in Maya, sculpted and detailed in zBrush, baked using xNormal, and textured using a combination of Photoshop and 3DCoat. Rendered in Unity.
Concept art by Olly Moss.
Hidden is an Augmented Reality platform that embeds rich multimedia AR experiences at real world locations. Using geocaching, storytelling, and game design it encourages people to explore their local environment and find all the hidden stories there.
I am primarily responsible for taking sculpts done by our creature artist Didrik Tollefsen and retopologizing, texturing, and rigging them. I also did mocap acting and animation for the humanoid trolls using a custom Vive mocap rig.
One of our clients was a promo event for the movie “Askeladden i Soria Moria Slott” where we made an AR conversion of one of the CGI monsters from the film. My job was to take the original CGI troll and optimize and compress it down so it could be displayed on mobile devices.
The original troll was made by Umedia and Maarten Verhoeven
At FooVR we were making The Foo Show which was an experimental talk show / podcast live recorded and displayed in Virtual Reality. We interviewed game developers within scenes from their own games, as well as nanotechnology researchers at the microscopic level, and Adam Savage in a virtual set filled with 3D scans of a selection of his movie props.
We also worked with Adult Swim to produce a live streamed commentary on The Superbowl featuring live 3D versions of characters from the cartoon series Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
I was the sole 3D artist on this project, and as such my responsibilities involved the entire pipeline. From modeling and design, to rigging and tech art. A big part of my job was converting the assets from our interviewees projects to work within VR and Unity.
Never Ever was an isometric strategy game for iOS developed by Wandake. It was unfortunately cancelled.
I did all the modeling, zBrush sculpting, and texturing. As well as the pose and render.
Modeled in Maya, sculpted in zBrush, textured in 3DCoat, rendered in Maya.
Concept by Ryan Jones and Matt Elser
Mothhead was a tech demo I worked on during my internship at Massive Black. We worked with Unity to produce a tech demo that showcased the high end rendering capabilities of the Unity Engine at a time it was mostly considered a lightweight mobile games engine.
We were a small team of 3-4 artists. I was primarily responsible for environment art and props.
Check it out the demo here:
