I was heavily involved in the R&D team within our Creative Studio model. Below are some samples of the proofing I directly contributed to. These particular samples were for a WB Games corporate pitch that was going to be a 2012 upcoming title, The Hobbit. The R&D work additionally resulted in further evolution of our proprietary engine.
I was in charge of creating the look and feel of Desolate Vale's atmosphere and technical solves. Below is one of the mood comps I created to set the tone and widely shared it for the team's creative and aesthetic targets.
Below is a custom sky dome I fully built out in Maya which contained various layered meshes to allow for scrolling clouds and dynamic day and night cycles, along with custom shader ramps for right and left hemispheres.
For the layered cloud system, I created it in Terrigen that could be additionally adjusted by Designers within engine logic. I also wrote custom syntax within the proprietary world builder file that is called in-engine in order to control the sun's pitch (point, speed and fade) for dynamic solar lens flares.
For Desolate Vale's land chunk, I used World Machine. From there, to ensure the water ways fit the landscape, I exported the mesh into Maya and created custom water meshes.
Using the World Machine mesh as a guide in Maya, I created both a mesh to go along the entire brook, and a custom shader for the shallow waters. I also created and provided Designer-placeable water wake meshes with flow maps to allow the Designers to have flexibility of scriptable parameters for further shader control.
Below is one very large and complex problem that needed solving due to its high visibility.
Anyone familiar with The Hobbit would know that within Desolate Vale, Lonely Mountain was always ominously present with its large mass looming over the landscape. Having such a large model within the land chunk was a significant performance hit while attempting to maintain the feel of this mountain's monolithic presence towering off in the vista. We needed to find a solution, along with one that that would not compromise performance by turning off LODs or using imposters which compromise visual quality.
The solve that I created was to take the front face portion of the Lonely Mountain sculpt in Maya and also apply meshes with scrolling clouds along the mountain, providing contrast to its scale. I was able to embed the entity asset into the sky dome file that I already created as mentioned above. And.... it worked!
Below is a body of work. These are just some of the direct contributions that I made, from creative visual goal setting within production art and VFX. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work on multiple revolving projects at once, including R&D look dev projects for future green-lighting. Much of my direct contributions tapped into every facet of the art production pipeline to achieve the end visual goals. This ranged from modeling, texturing, rigging, animating and VFX, as well as doing the scripting and logic for in-engine integration of these in-game visuals using proprietary tools. Additionally, I worked closely with the graphic engineers to improve optimization and Fidelity benchmarking.
