Effects and Cinematics

Houdini Sparkling Water

Embergen Portal

A stylized portal effect I made in Embergen. Built as a looping pre-rendered sprite and made to export as a VDB for a full 3D effect in Unreal.

Slayscape

I served as the Art Director for Slayscape. I created VFX and did the lighting, shading, materials, character animations, helped with dungeon layout and overall visual style and unification.

Slayscape torches

I built the main stylized flame elements in Embergen, with some post effects. The smoke used an erosion material with hand-painted textures. Torch fire may not seem like a big deal as a VFX asset, but it was quite important to our dungeon game. Getting the right stylized feel was key.

I spent quite a bit time up front to set up the many torches and braziers properly as prefab variants so that I could have global knobs for tweaking the VFX and light settings. This mattered more than usual, since I wanted so many different light colors (an asset multiplier) for setting mood with our cartoony feel.

Slayscape Handpainted Bubbling Lava

Dawn of Fire

I served as the Lead Tech / VFX artist for the Austin studio of Arctic 7. I led the creation of VFX for combat and did some ambient environment VFX in addition to helping out with the character pipeline.

Shroud of the Avatar

I served as Sr. Tech / VFX artist and then as Lead / Principal Artist for Shroud of the Avatar from 2017 to 2022 – here is a sampling of the VFX for the game:

Tie Fighter Explosion

This was a test to see if I could make a decent looking explosion for the mobile space (not a lot of overdraw or too many particles):

Dead Run

I did most of the effects for a zombie sidescroller-shooter called Dead Run (working title). This meant a lot of explosions and smoke and fire and breaking windows and blood, but also nice things like bugs flying around street lights and church windows with their god rays (0:41 in the video).

I animated most of the “little big moments,” like a helicopter crashing into a bridge (fast forward the video to 1:00), and a gas tanker truck crashing into a cell phone tower (1:43), and an airplane crashing at an airport (not shown).

In addition, I was responsible for setting the values of the procedural “fog” shader (created by Cid Newman) that we used to create atmospheric perspective and to silhouette closer objects against brighter, more distant objects. I also made the sky with scrolling layers of clouds to give an illusion of depth.

Effects

Boiling water effect for the cooking game for the Food Network – “Cook or Be Cooked!”

Food Network was extremely concerned early on that boiling water look just right.

Our lead programmer, Jason Hughes, wrote a cool “fluid advection” module for our particles. When the player would stir the boiling water, the particle bubbles would swirl around accordingly, along with the motion of the spoon.

Mushroom Men VFX

Thor (Wii) VFX

And a sample of fun, kooky effects from a music game for the iPad:

Cinematics

I used Terminal Reality’s Infernal engine to script a number of cinematics, using a C-like scripting language that TRI created (they wrote their own freaking scripting language!). This controlled camera movement and FOV over time, character animations and movement, triggering VFX, and timing of various other things. Here are just a couple from Mushroom Men (there were quite a few):

And just for fun, here’s something I did as my first cinematic, 30 years ago: Intro cinematic for Wing Commander Armada (1994)