FX Technical Director

Selected Works

A series of cinematic studies done entirely within a Houdini-centric pipeline. I was responsible for all aspects of production, from environment creation to final rendering, exploring both CPU and GPU-based workflows.

KEY CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Pipeline: Assembled and lit scenes in Houdini (Solaris) with a focus on USD workflow implementation.

  • Environment: Generated terrains in Gaea and vegetation in SpeedTree, creating complex biomes.

  • Character FX: Handled character groom and cloth simulation using Marvelous Designer and Houdini Vellum.

  • Rendering: Explored multiple render engines (Karma, Redshift, Arnold)

Game Cinematic VFX

  • Crowd Pipeline: Engineered a performant crowd system using Houdini to drive particle movement, baked into Vertex Animation Textures (VATs) for massive scale. Included Vellum cloth simulations for flags integrated directly into character animations.

  • Hero Combat (Mobile): Directed and created Hero ability VFX for an unreleased mobile 4x strategy game. Focused on gameplay clarity and strict mobile performance budgets (overdraw/draw call management).

  • Marketing Assets: Created high-fidelity VFX for marketing videos, pushing particle counts and emitter complexity.

  • Optimization R&D: Conducted technical benchmarking comparing Nanite vs. Traditional LOD workflows for crowd rendering to define the project's optimal path.

Realtime VFX

Procedural Tools

My goal is to create complex technical logic behind artist-friendly interfaces. I build engine-agnostic tools that handle the heavy lifting, from massive city layouts to prop placement. allowing artists to focus purely on creativity rather than manual repetition.

TOOL SUITE

  • OSM City Generator: A hierarchical tool that ingests OpenStreetMaps data to generate realistic road layouts, which then drives a nested Building Generator HDA to populate the city automatically.

  • Wave Function Collapse (WFC) Dungeon: A level design tool utilizing WFC algorithms to generate infinite, logic-valid dungeon layouts.

  • Scatter Systems: An optimized instancing tool from city generation to organic set dressing.

  • Production Utilities: A suite of "Quality of Life" tools that tackled repetitive manual tasks.