General Demo Reel
Hidden Gem - an Animation Project from TAMU's Summer Industry Course 2020

Aggie Alumni from various studios - including DreamWorks, Disney Animation, and Blue Sky - mentored us with the challenge of making a good quality animation in 30 seconds. My team consisted of five members. My roles were animation, rigging, compositing, dust effects, and crystal cluster modeling. This took place during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, so our communication with one another was limited to video calls. With the lack of a free render farm, our resources were limited to our personal computers. 

The Lizard Rig for the Summer Industry Course project. It uses driven keys for subtle shifting of the body crystals with additional handles on several clusters for deeper control. Blendshapes were used for opening/closing its eyes and for breathing. The breathing is hard to see in this demo because it clips with the crystals, but as the animator, I was fine with manually controlling the placement of the clusters to match the breathing. The back legs and tail were not going to be animated so it wasn't rigged. 

Termination Test - a personal animation project

This is an animation project I did on my own (aside from music) using Blender. This part is not finished yet, and there are still some areas I would like to tweak and edit before starting on part two. It uses cel shading, an orthographic camera, and simple shapes and colors to give a more 2D feel. Smears on the Robot were exported as vertex caches from Houdini. Smears on any other object were simply drawn in using After Effects. Eyes were rendered on a separate layer to edit in After Effects. There were some interesting complications with this workflow, especially when switching between orthographic view and perspective. The pile of robot parts at the end was made using Houdini's rigid body dynamics system.

Houdini Smear Tool

A quick 10 second demo of my Motion Smear tool in Houdini. This is the beginning of what will become my Capstone final graduation project. It was used in the previously shown animation in a few areas. This tool is still a work in progress.

Drone Models

Buzzsaw drone

Bulkier drone with a minigun (was used as a base for the hammer drone shown in the animation). 

Teminal Force - Game Dev Class Project

Gameplay of the game Terminal Force - a Game Development class team project.
My Roles: Character Design, Character Modeling, UV unwrapping, Character Rigging, Character Animator, Animation Programmer, Creative Direction, Game Design, UI Design.

Demo of a pixel-art workflow concept for my game development class in Unity (this idea was scrapped due to shift in art direction). It uses a render texture at a 100x100 px size without anti aliasing to get a pixelated effect. The cube uses two render textures: one is a cel shaded textured version of my character, and the other is the emission mapped version. A bloom shader is then applied to the cube to give that glowing effect.

To make the character point his gun in any direction in 2D space, I animated the top half of his body pointing in multiple directions and used an animation controller to interpolate according to the direction the player is pointing to. Extra animations for pointing up-back and down-back were later added.

Playable Characters. Each character has a different special ability. Alternate colors per character were also added.

Virtual Reality Team Research Project

A team project from my Virtual Reality class. The point is to see the effect of fantasy elements on sports simulations as well as prospect theory in a competitive environment. Assets for the environment (excluding paddle) were borrowed from the Unity Asset Store. Interactions were modified from Steam VR's development kit. I was in charge of the slow-motion mechanic, application of effects, application of sounds (borrowed from freesounds.org, edited in Audition and Unity), haptic feedback, game design (aside from my team's Project Adviser), ball tracking, paddle interaction, paddle modeling/surfacing, ball-to-paddle physics and collisions, and helping in other mechanics/programming.

(And yes, the ball is supposed to go through the opponent sometimes)

Misc Projects

Video Demonstration of a procedural lightning tool made using Houdini and Vex.

A walk -> canter -> run gait animation inspired by the Siberian Huskey. The animation is done entirely through MEL Expressions Editor in Maya. The only thing keyframed is the slider that controls the speed.

3D Barrier-Grid animation (sometimes called "Scanimation") using Houdini and Vex. This was made with 3D printability in mind, which is why there are vertical panels. The idea was to print them in slices.

Video Compilation of my projects for my Image Synthesis class. It starts with a image-based shader that uses a normal map that I transferred from Maya, and some light and dark images I made in Adobe Illustrator. It eventually goes into my process making a raytracer from scratch using C++ and CUDA. It works in realtime.

Typography/Motion Design Project

Typography made in Adobe Illustrator. Animation made with After Effects.

Graphic Design Flatwork

Poster Design Assignment (inspired by YouTube series Vsause)

Branding Project. Chocolate bar label design & logo design. Came up with a company that sells bars of dark chocolate, where each square has a fruit filling of varying colors and flavors. The brand is Art Deco themed, where the bar is supposed to represent a case of fruity "gemstones".

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