Embedded Files
Responsible for all aspects unless otherwise noted.
ILLUMINAL (TBD ~2028) - Houdini Muscle & Cloth Simulati
ILLUMINAL is a solo 3D animated short film in progress at UCF's Animation & Visual Effects MFA 3-year program.
A student battles self-doubt until a radiant tiger in a surreal void guides them to discover beauty in their scars and stretch marks.
ILLUMINAL's main story and conflict are heavily influenced by the character acting and performance of the ethereal, mystical tiger that appears in a vision to the student. In my research on impactful animal performances in media, muscle simulation became a topic of interest.
In doing research on current pipelines and technical developments in VFX software, I created my own pipeline in Houdini based on the needs of the production.
You can read more about my process here.
Paper Warriors (2025) - Unreal Engine Niagara Volumetric Smoke Simulation
Responsible for Smoke VFX, Lighting, Compositing.
Responsible for Smoke VFX, Compositing.
In a handful of shots in Paper Warriors, our scissors character wreaks havoc on the paper world. A smoke effect was required, and utilizing Unreal Engine 5's Niagara Fluids, I created a volumetric smoke that collides with characters.
Bringing in the environment as an FBX and characters as Alembic Caches from Maya, I was able to visualize the world our team created. Similar lighting was created in Unreal which kept a similar look to the final renders and composites. With feedback from my team, I was able to create an effect that balanced stylistic unity while saving time.
The smoke was rendered out as a plate from Unreal Engine with unlit shader characters, creating a plate that could be composited in Nuke.
This new experience allowed me to introduce Unreal's Niagara Systems into our team's traditional film pipeline, and was an exciting challenge.
Paper Warriors (2025) - Houdini Rock Generation
An overview of the subnetwork that creates the high-poly mesh from an input.
On the short film Paper Warriors, we had a lot of rocks to work on and to make this process more efficient, I created a piece of our pipeline that could automate certain tasks.
To start things off, I wanted to make sure that my pipeline was as accessible as possible. So, I created some notes about Houdini for those who aren't as familiar with it, and in my file I wrote extensive notes to illustrate my process.
You can read more about my process here.
The main goal was to let artists make a low poly or rough model of what they wanted their rock to look like, Houdini would generate a high poly rock based off it using certain types of noise and techniques, and then the rock could be exported to ZBrush for refinement and details.
Since our rocks draw inspiration from games like Overwatch, League of Legends and other games, this step was pretty necessary since each rock has its place, and we wanted to utilize a specific brush set to unify the style and give freedom to our asset artists.
After the artists would make their high poly, they could toss it back into Houdini to let it generate a low poly version complete with UV unwrapping.
An overview of the subnetworks that make up the project, blue is generating a high poly rock, and green accepts input from a file import that will get turned low poly and UV unwrapped.
An overview of the subnetwork that creates the low-poly, UV unwrapped mesh from the input. This is used after the high-poly sculpt is approved and imported back in the file.
An overview of the process throughout the entire pipeline.
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