Character Development Samples
Film, Television, Games, UX Simulation
Hand Study
Pose Space Deformation
This is a hand that I modeled and rigged almost 2 decades ago. I share it here to illustrate that I've been working in this area for a long time! :)
May I be so bold as to say it holds up better than many hands seen across different media today. A few things to take note of:
The mesh is optimal, with quad edge loops and no detail unless it's needed.
The creases in the fingers maintain volume and form an air tight grip.
The palm volume shifts as the grip tightens.
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To accomplish this, I wrote tools that allowed me to sculpt the desired shape at any given pose, and then extract the delta of the sculpt and link it to the bones responsible for achieving that pose.
Performance Capture
Volumetric, Mocap, XR, Biometric
As the Head of UX Simulation at Toyota Research Institute Advanced Development, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to build facilities, an international and cross-functional team, and the infrastructure for building and running immersive virtual simulations.
There are a lot of details that cannot yet be disclosed but I will describe the subject matter a bit further.
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We setup a space for supporting up to 16 simultaneous participants, each immersed in VR with their own avatars. This included a combination of several technologies, including Vicon, Vive, Kinect, and others. All of the local apparatus allowed us to iterate, refine and support remote experiences with more participants connecting from other offices or from home.
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We also set up other sensors for deeper insights, and I learned a lot from UX Researchers about eye tracking and saccades, galvanic response and other biometrics for understanding the state of people immersed in experiences we created.
Customizable Character Pipeline
Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare
I have the fondest memories of working on this game.
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We set out to do new things. Plants that could up-root and run around! Burrow underground! Pilot flying drones! Swallow other characters whole, CHOMP!
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One interesting story from my time on this, was when the Sims 4 project got delayed so we inherited a month of dev time from an outsourcing team that Sims 4 had scheduled but weren't ready to use. In two days, I wrote a script to automate the creation of 1000 accessories based on the concept art. Each accessory was fully functional, plugged into the games progression system, and use the correct number of polygons and texture sizes... and we sent these to the outsourcing team so it would only be the art that would update, while we could already test the functionality in game even before they started.
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