All Settled in the Big City....

The new year marked a pretty dramatic change: I moved to San Francisco from a boring little town near Sacramento. In addition to an aggressive job search, I've been splitting my time between a number of projects to bolster my portfolio. One such project is a reproduction of my apartment.

I'm still in the early stages, but it's far enough along to show off. The goal is to eventually reproduce the entire apartment. My focus is to take it one room a time, reproducing as much detail as possible along the way. The main pieces of furniture for the bedroom are done, but I've got quite a bit of clean-up to do on them before I can start building all of the additional props to dress them with. More to come.

Happy Christma-Kwanza-Hanukkah!!!!

Spent the entire week before Thanksgiving suffering through a miserable cold, and I recovered just in time for work to get absolutely insane. I have, however, managed to cobble together a VERY rough new VR prototype: I took my prototype "Survival Shooter" and converted it into a stationary turret shooter for Google Cardboard. I also did some navigation tests to explore the possibility of an "On-Rails" experience. Initial results were promising.

Additionally, I've done a bit of character animation, which will be followed by some new character art. As soon as that work is presentable, I'll be adding a dedicated animation section to this site. I'll be able to post more frequently once the holidays are over.

Happy Accidents...

Ran into a neat error while processing assets for a VR prototype. I imported a 3d scan into Blender that was made with Project Tango, and discovered the mesh wasn't shading properly. Since this was a prototype, I said "Screw it" and imported the mesh into Unity when I was done cleaning it up. Once I added a light to the room, I saw the potential for some good nightmare fuel. I still have no idea what's going on, but I'll be exploring a haunted house-style VR experience in the future because of this...

Kaiju Demo Update

Spent some time this week working on a monster design for the Kaiju Demo, and I'm extremely happy with the results. Free-modeled off of a back-of-the-envelope sketch, Jragoi The Lizard King is a Bearded Dragon/Godzilla - inspired Kaiju. In my freetime this past week I, modeled, UV mapped, rigged, and animated the character. Additionally, a prefab has been tested in Unity with a Animator Controller and a cloth simulation, and it runs better than I could have hoped for. I'm out of town at the moment, but when I return I'll begin texturing and setting up materials. I'll post updated in-engine screen captures once that's completed later this week.

Up and running with Google Cardboard

Ok this is exciting: after browsing job postings on LinkedIn for a couple of days, I noticed a decent number of modeling/art jobs weren't even in game development, but were for architectural visualization/VR. I've had a Project Tango and a Google Cardboard for a month now, and I've been DYING to start playing with them. Time to get crazy...