Character TD and Technical Animator

Projects and Games

Untitled Unreal Game

Lead Technical Animator
Serenity Forge
Jan 2023 - Jan 2025

An unannounced, discontinued, Unreal Engine 5 project set in a sci-fi future, focused on high-fidelity first person cinematic and tactile experiences. During this project I focused on first person gameplay and cinematic animations, character rigs in Maya and UE Control Rigs, adaptive and procedural animation systems, MetaHumans, physics and cloth assets, particle systems, and gameplay experiences. Much of this project is under NDA and can only be viewed with specific permissions. Please see a breakdown of my responsibilities below and contact me for more details regarding this project.

    • Managed an animation team of 3.

    • Created and utilized Animation Blueprints and Control Rigs for all Characters, both organic and mechanical.

    • Created an adaptive first person IK pickup system.

    • Developed additive and procedural animations, state machines, and thread-safe blending for performant and smooth animations.

    • Designed an adaptive first person climbing interaction.

    • Animated and created many first person tactile experiences.

    • Optimized Animation Blueprints for better CPU performance.

    • Captured and retargeted body and facial animation data for cinematic and gameplay sequences.

    • Created cinematic and gameplay animations for mechanical and organic characters.

    • Developed, updated, and maintained character and prop skeletons, skin data, and control rigs.

    • Collaborated with Technical and Design departments to create modular characters for gameplay functions in both AI and Player characters.

    • Designed gameplay functions to increase the player experience.

    • Developed experimental solutions to large problems including a particle-based crowd simulation.

    • Resolved animation and gameplay related bugs including animation syncing, skin weight issues, and animation blending problems.

    • Worked with MetaHumans to create new costumes, faces, and animations.

    • Organized and created comprehensive documentation and records for animation processes and game design features.

Student’s Projects

Adjunct Professor
DigiPen Institute of Technology
Sep 2024 - Present

A compilation of student cinematic projects created during the Unreal Engine Projects I design and teach. All students are sophomores of DigiPen Institute of Technology’s Digital Art and Animation Degree Program. Sophomores start the year with only minimal knowledge of the Unreal Engine and are given timeframes of ~7 weeks to conceptualize, plan, and execute on a short film idea. Students are lectured on a wide variety of subjects within the Unreal Engine and in cinematography. The goal of the course is to give students experience with modern tools and future pipelines that are starting to be utilized and desired in the film industry today, including motion capture, digital production, and real time rendering.

    • Lead and lecture a class of up to 30 students.

    • Create and organize a teaching curriculum to span two semesters.

    • Facilitate conversations around leadership, cooperation, and organizational practices.

    • Lecture and guide on a wide variety of Unreal Engine topics, spanning from simple navigation, to Control Rigs, Niagara, Blueprints, PCGs, Animation Retargeting, Post Process Effects and more.

    • Guide students through proper asset and production pipelines.

    • Instruct on Source Control, primarily Perforce, to facilitate cooperative team projects.

    • Aid students in a problem solving as unique cases occur in the classroom.

    • Critique students and guide them toward more structured or scoped ideas.

    • Grade and provide constructive feedback for all students to encourage personal and professional growth.

Personal Unreal Project

Jan 2024 - Present

A personal project designed with the intent to further my knowledge of skills and techniques within my field. So far these skills have included character modeling, texturing, modular character setup, character rigging, physics and Chaos cloth setup, animation and post process animation Blueprints, UE materials and shaders, and Blueprint programming. My current objective is getting a complex, layered, full body cloth outfitted character working both visually and performantly well. I will continue to develop this project to work with new tools and refine my skills.

    • Design and develop all assets from the ground up for implementation into the Unreal Engine.

    • Research and execute on new techniques for solving complex problems such as layered cloth or moving textures on characters.

    • Develop a modular character to allow for the potential of multiple outfit sets or for controlling visible aspects of the layered character.

    • Create character and prop models with well-designed topologies for deformation and physics simulations.

    • Create textures that align with the concept of the character.

    • Create materials within Unreal for multiple Material Instance uses.

    • Create Physics Assets and Chaos Cloth simulation data for character outfits.

    • Design Blueprint systems for better character control, camera control and player experience.

Homestead Arcana

Animator
Serenity Forge
Nov 2021 - Dec 2022

Homestead Arcana is a charming indie Unity game set in a fantasy world, focusing on relationships, farming, and stealth gameplay elements. During my time on this project, I focused on creating gameplay and cinematic animations, solving character animation and technical bugs, creating python pipeline scripts, rigging new characters, and rigging new clothing assets for the main player character. Throughout this project I became more familiar with Unity, its procedural rigging plugins, C#, and Python scripting. Homestead Arcana became my third published and available-to-play game.

    • Animated new cutscenes and adjusted all cutscenes based on directorial feedback.

    • Created gameplay animations for all creatures.

    • Adjusted skin weights of new and old character assets for improved visuals.

    • Worked with Unity’s Animation Rigging system to produce more complicated cutscene interactions.

    • Created skeleton and control rigs for characters and props.

    • Developed Python tools for Maya to Unity export pipelines.

    • Worked in state machines to properly set up animation transitioning for characters and props.

Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut

Jr. Character Technical Artist
Sucker Punch Productions
Mar 2021 - Sep 2021

Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut is an enhanced version of the acclaimed open-world action-adventure game for PS5 that immerses players in the captivating world of feudal Japan. The Director’s Cut added a whole new part of the world with a brand new story line and characters. During this project, I was responsible for technical aspects of the animation pipeline. This included facial capture retargeting, cloth assets rigging, and in-engine asset setups. I created cloth data for nearly all clothing assets for the new Pirate Faction, simulation data for the new Horse Armor and Saddle Bags, and facial capture for several new and recurring characters including the pirate leader, Fune, and the main character Jin. Much of this work was done with proprietary pipelines and technologies that cannot be showcased.

    • Facial capture and retargeting using Maya and DynamiXYZ.

    • Character Rigging and Skin weight painting within Maya.

    • Character Cloth and Hair simulation weight painting within Maya.

    • Character clothing, hair, and outfit setup within Sucker Punch’s Custom Engine.

    • Quality assurance testing and detailed bug reporting.

    • Python tools debugging and updating from 2.8 to 3.0.

    • Character Rig debugging.

Metamorphos

Technical Animator
Spicy Dice Studios
Sep 2019 - May 2021

Metamorphos is a third-person hack-and-slash game inspired by Dark Souls. Players take on the role of the temple's guardian, fighting their way through corrupted denizens, wildlife, and warriors in a beautiful desert environment. The goal is to confront Nafaset the Defiler, and restore the blessed oases. The game features fast-paced melee combat, challenging enemies, and immersive audio. During this student project, I was responsible for rigging all characters, developing procedural rigging scripts for Maya to aid in the rigging pipelines, and animating the final boss enemy to align with the combat system. Metamorphos is my first published and available-to-play game.

    • Created rigs and skin data for all characters.

    • Created cloth simulation for the main player character.

    • Created full animation set for final boss enemy to align with game design needs.

    • Set up state machines for all characters within Unity.

    • Problem solved and bug fixed animation and character related issues.

Automatic Face Rig

The Automated Face Rig is a Python tool built for Maya designed to create accurate face rigs with minimal user input. By placing a few key joints and drawing a few curves using Maya’s native tools, this tool is able to generate a high-fidelity, joint-based, realistic deforming face rig for humanoids without needing blend shapes or complex processes. The tool also generates several layers of automated animation controls for easy and fast animation creation.

With further time to develop, this tool could require no input from the user at all. If this tool were tied to a locked vertex count model, the tool could generate the skeleton, controls, and skin weights to match any face with the same vertex count and order without needing user input. Furthermore, the tool could be developed to create Skeletal LODs based on this locked vertex order. I believe this is may be similar to how MetaHumans are created.

    • Designed a UI using QT Pyside and Pymel for use inside of Maya.

    • Developed multiple functions and reusable code, such as a joint on curve function, to be reused throughout the script.

    • Designed automated animation controls that allow for levels of control over the facial expressions.

Houdini AutoRig and Body Morpher

The Houdini AutoRig and Body Morpher was a project I completed as a student. The project aimed to make a simple to use Python tool for Houdini 18.0 that would allow the user to make a full body and face rig in a matter of minutes, while at the same time allowing that rig to manipulate the proportions of the character with the intent of producing rigged crowds. Houdini, of course, has many other solutions to this, and this pipeline is now outdated due to many KineFX updates, however the objective of this project was to learn, explore, and build something that may have had a practical use at the time. While this tool never went on to be used in any true capacity, it allowed me to interview and intern at SideFX working in the Education and Training Department making videos and tutorials on the new KineFX system introduced in Houdini 18.5.

    • Designed a UI using QT Pyside for use inside of Houdini.

    • Scripted functions to work with file browsing on the OS.

    • Scripted tools for user input to allow for varied sized human characters.

    • Created automated functions and connections that allow for body proportion modifications.

Mr. McCorporate Stylized Rig

Mr. McCorporate was a project with the intent of guiding my through the full character creation process, from modeling based on a concept, to texturing, to fully rigging the character. The intent of the character and rig was to follow along with the concepts and style as best as possible. Creating a rig that was able to meet such great design was challenging. I believe, in the end, the face was able to make fairly good expressions following along with the concepts, but the body ended up feeling too soft. Layered outfits were also somewhat of a mystery to me at the time, and continue to be a fascination of mine to this day. If I were to reproach this character with my current experience, I would focus on a way of preserving the pristine edges present in the concepts within 3D space. Redesigning the jacket to flow as conceptualized would also be high priority.

    • Modeled the character to have well defined topology that flows well for deformation.

    • Created an elastic style rig in as many places as possible to allow for stylized and free posing of the model.

    • Created automated controls for fast posing with several aspects of the rig including lips, hands, and feet quick posing.

    • Character Design by AD Taeza.