Last updated: 2010-06-01
(Work in Progress An HLSL cryaon shader I have been working on. While I haven't decided exactly how I want to do the crayon shading for objects (with more texture or more code), this does feature support for lights with toon shading, and a ink outline that jitters to give the appearance of coloring "outside the lines." Artist has full control over amount of jitter, ink noise, toon shading, etc. Created using FX Composer.
(Work in Progress) This is a shot from our senior film, "Izzy." As surfacing lead, I've been in charge of getting the shaders to look like the concept art (below). I've provided the above image for context; only the trees, bushes, a couple of the birds, and main character (Izzy) in the above image are mine, as well as the atmospheric shader. I oversaw and approved other student's work on the rest of the shaders in this shot.
The above concept art is NOT mine, but provided for reference into our concept for the film. Below are renders of the in-progress shaders from this shot:
(Work in Progress) The original texture maps for Izzy were painted by another member of our team. I took over work on Izzy after they left. I've continued to work on the textures since then (including the blushing on her face and cleaning/editing her sweater.) In addition, all of the specular, subsurface (little though there is) and bump details are my work.
(Work in Progress) I procedurally created the leaves on the above tree using a combination of Houdini/Python scripting and MEL scripting in Maya. I can easily control the amount of grooming, droop, and shaping of leaves. I am in the process of working on the leaf specular qualities.
Trash can from the previous senior film "X-ing." Painted texture maps, purposefully ballooned trashcan with displacement a bit to really dent it up since original model wasn't correct for style of film.
A turnaround of a procedural mango shader; my first-ever RenderMan shader. Done entirely with Slim nodes, no texture maps.
Our last senior film, "X-ing." Since I was the only one working on the film for the last 3 months, doing rendering and compositing, I figured it was worth showing, as I rendered around a third of the film.
A frame from the previous film "X-ing" which I rendered and composited. I fixed lighting, shaders, reflection, and subsurface before rendering.
A frame of the final shot from "X-ing," which I also rendered and composited. You can see the bushes in the background, which we used proxy objects for, but which I had to fix early in the rendering phase due to various bugs. I also troubleshot a lot of the problems that came up having two ghost characters (with their particles). Below, I've provided some various layers that had to be fixed before final compositing.
Diffuse Only
(Work in Progress) A small class (4 in the core group, with 2 others helping with asset creation) have designed and are building a small game in the Unreal Development Kit. We finished our initial design just a couple weeks ago, and we are now proceeding to build the game in the engine. Our game design document can be viewed here: Out of Darkness Design Document It should be noted that this is BYU's first foray into a game project, so we've been working with the professor to figure everything out for future projects.
Two friends and I created a browser-based space MMORPG back in 2001. We got a couple of awards from various MMO review sites, and at our peak, had 10,000 users. We shut the game down in 2007 (though the other 2 members have been working for several years on a spinoff game). I am providing some links to archive.org of some help files to give a sense of the design. The game was primarily text based, with graphics used only for flavor.
The basic gameplay revolves around a single ship that the player owns. The ship flys around the galaxy trading various goods and items to make money to buy better ships. While there are several basic ship types, every ship is entirely customizable using Upgrades and Equipment. There are unlimited upgrades, which can increase everything from shields, to number of weapons or cargo holds, but upgrades get progressively more expensive to install on the ship. There are also a limited number of equipment slots, which provide unique abilities to the ship (such as defending against certain weapons, or enhancing your sensors, or a cloaking device.)
The game was fully Player vs. Player at all times, making it a game of survival as well as wealth. Anytime a ship was not docked at a planet or station, it was vulnerable to attack. If a ship was destroyed, the player was not killed, but had to fly to a station in a escape pod and buy a new ship. Combat was quick and deadly, and usually over within seconds.
A simple, text-based MUD based on Cyan Worlds' "Myst" series of games. I ran it with permission from the company under the provision that I would stay non-profit, which I did. The game was about players creating and exploring text-based worlds in a multiplayer environment (similar to old DOS adventure games, such as Zork). There was no combat, only roleplay. Cyan Worlds would eventually go on to create Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, an MMO with a similar vein of exploration and puzzle solving that borrowed heavily from our fan-based world, but just like Writer's of D'ni before it, Uru did not have enough interest after a while and was shut down several times.
While there was little game design in this text world, I did design the world and administrate it, learning a lot about community building, programming, and what makes games interesting (or in this case, not). I shut down the game and moved onto the TDZK project (above), using what I learned here.