Portfolio

For my last semester at my Masters program, I worked at Meta Reality Labs (then known as Oculus Research Pittsburgh) as a Technical Artist, working on various tools and art pipeline improvements.

My main task was integrating art assets into Unreal Engine 4 for an internal social VR project, ensuring they were rendered according to artist specifications. Furthermore, I worked on several Maya scripts for exporting blendshape animation data and meshes for the research team's use. I also assisted the artists with rigging and cleaning up meshes for the VR avatars.

This video was made after my time there, but it demonstrates how the meshes were driven using a VR headset. It's very exciting to see how much the technology has progressed since I was there.

VR art experience inspired by the book Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I worked on this project as a technical artist on rigging, effects, environment art and environment layout, using Maya and Unreal Engine 4.

I made a stream building tool for the project, using Unreal's material system and blueprints. The shape, color and glow of each stream can be customized.

I also rigged the bird that the player is riding on, using a modified version of a rigging Maya script I wrote:

Below is a video of the full experience.

The project website can be found here.

Developed two Maya tools using Python, a rigging tool and a pose saver tool.

Rigging tool

The rigging tool automatically generates controls for human characters. The script takes in the names for each joint and rigs the model according to the joints, so it assumes that certain joints are present in the model.

Pose Saver

The pose saver tool allows you to save and load character poses. You can also use it to mirror poses and animation.

The model was generated using Mixamo, the UI was created using PySide.

I worked on this project as a technical artist. The film “Lovers Meet” is a blended live-action and 3D animated short film about a young man, Isaac, who finds himself inside the world of an impressionist painting.

My main task on the film was retargeting and refining mocap data. I also worked on modeling, rigging, camera setup, and lighting, using Maya and MotionBuilder.

Below is an example of how I refined the mocap animation in MotionBuilder. I first get the raw mocap data, and retarget the animation to the models. Then, I adjust the keyframes of the animation to get the final result.

I also worked on the transition scene from live-action to animation. You can see my progress video below.

The final transition effect is timestamped below, along with the final film:

The project website can be found here.

I was a research assistant at the Articulab at CMU during the summer, where I worked on a virtual assistant. I was the sole Unity developer on the project, working on the front end systems such as UI and the character animation system. I also helped with setting up the character in Maya and integrating it into Unity.

We used the Virtual Human Toolkit by USC-ICT to drive the character, and I worked on integrating the toolkit with the Unity environment and character. The video below shows the demo that was shown at the World Economic Forum 2017.

The project website can be found here.

Collection of work done in the class Building Virtual Worlds.

Real-time fluid simulation in CUDA using the SPH algorithm, which involved dividing the particles up into grids and doing the calculations based on how the neighboring grids and particles interact with each other. The force on each particle will then be calculated depending on it's neighbors. Done as part of Parallel Computer Architrcture and Programming class.

Here is the project report

Experimental Game Design final project. Worked with an artist to create a Kinect-controlled game made in Processing. Used a skeleton detection library (SimpleOpenNI) to allow players to puppeteer movement of a three-headed dog using the Kinect.

Done as part of Computer Graphics class. Wrote a raytracer using C++ that supports reflections and refractions. Raytracing is a rendering technique that traces a ray through a scene to produce a 3D image. The reflection and refraction rays are done by recursively casting rays from their intersection points.

Here are some of the images I have rendered.