VR | AR | Game Engine
Welcome to my Technical Art page.
I have 5+ years of experience creating inside game engines, and extensive experience with Blueprints, Sequencer, motion capture, environment building, materials, shaders, virtual cameras and rendering, photogrammetry, realtime compositing, and VR / XR development.
I use Unreal Engine 4 and 5, Unity, Spark AR, MotionBuilder, the Adobe Suite (Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, Premiere), Maya, Blender, Substance Designer and Painter, TouchDesigner, Houdini, and Resolve.
Below you will find a number of personal and professional projects I have worked on.
Body of Mine VR
BODY OF MINE is a full-body VR experience that places you into the body of another gender, where you can interact with your skin to discover interviews with trans people.
Combining immersive technology with stories of transgender individuals, the intimate experience asks audiences to explore their own gender for an emotionally-charged combination of dance, animation, and interactive storytelling.
WINNER: SXSW 2023 - Special Jury Award
Tech art highlights include:
-
Real-time full body in-headset MOCAP (HTC Vive Pro Eye + Trackers + MetaHumans) with eye, hand, face, and body tracking, utilizing custom animation Blueprints and an Inverse Kinematics Solver
-
Procedurally-generated environment and textures, optimized for 90fps
-
Controller-free, gestural based interaction engineered for VR with custom built gameplay mechanics
-
Realtime skeletal mesh morphing
-
MOCAP animation capture and cleanup using Motive and Motion Builder
-
LGBTQ+VR empathy-focused design
I was the director and lead artist and engineer for this project.
Walkthrough Trailer:
Behind the Scenes Breakdown:
Lukova
Inspired by the abandoned St. George's Church in Lukova, Czech Republic, this project brings to life the haunting sculptures by Jakub Hadrava.
An experiment with cloth simulation in Marvelous Designer and photorealistic rendering, the short film meditates on religion, death, and the persistence of memory.
I was the sole artist for this project.
Created with the support of All of it Now: https://allofitnow.com/
Tech art highlights include:
-
Cloth simulation using Marvelous Designer & uDraper for both cached and realtime simulation
-
Custom created MetaHuman of Pope Francis & custom Pope costume
-
Deep dive into Lumen and console variables to achieve photorealistic rendering
-
Stained glass window lighting with custom textures and light functions
-
MetaHuman animation and facial capture with Live Link & Sequencer
Though I Do Not Know This Raven, We Seem to Share a Familiar Pain
This project is an exploration of optimizing UE5's realtime performance for live-action filmmaking.
This is a pre-visualization for a short film to be shot in October 2022. Following a young Jewish boy, a dead man, and a raven, the film explores the generational trauma of the Holocaust, told through the eyes of a child's nightmare.
I was the sole artist for this project. This is a work in progress.
Tech art highlights include:
-
Procedurally-created environment to allow for realtime changes to the world, groom, materials, lighting, and particle systems
-
Optimization to support live-action filmmaking and realtime rendering
-
Custom strand-based feather and particle systems using Niagara & Groom
-
Original environment painted with ZBrush
-
Realtime compositing with live camera tracking using an HTC Vive Tracker, Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4k, and an RTX 3090 powering UE5
don't you wonder?
When two extraterrestrial androids discover an uninhabitable planet Earth, they contemplate the meaning of life, religion, and human conquest.
Set 50,000 years in the future, "don't you wonder?" meditates on a post-human Earth through the lens of AI. This short film was written, directed, animated, and created solo by me.
Tech art highlights include:
-
Custom underwater lighting design
-
Atmospheric particle simulation with Niagara
-
Unique character animation in editor
-
Virtual cameras and editing using Sequencer
I was the sole artist for this project.
Full short film:
re...
"re..." is a distance... it is a feeling, a meditation, a daydream. It is my way of coping with growing older. It's a collection of the past, a portrait of a memory, a longing for a place distanced by time.
This is an ongoing project, a combination of photogrammetric scans of my family inside Unreal Engine 5 to meditate on the liminal space between goodbye and hello.
Tech art highlights include:
-
Photogrammetry captured using an iPhone 13 & Lumix DSLR
-
Custom Niagara particle systems
-
Virtual lighting and cinematography
I am the sole artist for this project.
Heartbeats
At the stroke of midnight, a puppet awakes. "Heartbeats" explores freedom, confinement, and isolation through the metaphor of a dancing puppet, utilizing vertical cinema to emphasize the brutality of his loneliness.
This project was an exercise in vertical filmmaking, real-time compositing, photorealistic rendering, and shoestring VFX.
Tech art highlights include:
-
Realtime compositing using Composure, polished in After Effects
-
Custom lighting design with a moving environment, animated and modified on set in realtime to allow for choreographic exploration
-
Handheld virtual cinematography using Vive Tracker motion, mounted to a Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6k
-
Rendering pipelines in UE4 to achieve believable photorealism
-
Animation hierarchies to allow for patterns and cause-and-effect simulation of moving gears
I was the sole artist for this project.