Effects and Cinematics

Shroud of the Avatar

I served as the Sr. Tech / VFX artist for Shroud of the Avatar from January 2017 to June of 2018 (I’m now Lead / Principal Artist) – 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

Here are a couple of the effects for the cooking game. I made quite a few effects for Star Wars Galaxies (unfortunately I don’t have samples), and a whole bunch for Mushroom Men, and quite a few for Thor…

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.

Here’s a random sampling of effects from Mushroom Men:

And here’s a sampling from Thor:

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

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, 20 years ago: Intro cinematic for Wing Commander Armada (1994)