About

For this canceled project at Visceral Games, I rigged and integrated character assets into the Frostbite game engine utilizing various proprietary technologies such as real-time cloth and runtime animation evaluation. I also implement character deformation and animation features into the Frostbite game engine as well as its proprietary animation software.

For the Michael Jackson performance, I designed and developed the studio asset management system. I also developed most of the artist tools such as the facial shape assembly system and PSD/blendShape system (which we ended up selling to Autodesk).

For Jack the Giant Slayer, I wrote deformation and pipeline tools. I wrote the facial assembly and animation system, a PSD system, and worked on a team to build the facial pipeline from mocap, solving and R&D, rigging, modeling and animation. I also wrote the facial transfer system that created the facial rigs of all the secondary and background giants from the hero giants with no additional touch up work.

I also rigged Fee the giant, which is the first giant that appears at the watering hole.

On MNM, I was the rigging point person for the facial rigs. I wrote the facial automation rig building tools used by modelers and riggers to build all the faces on MNM. I also continued to maintain and develop the rigging departments Maya API toolset. During my last few of months at IMD, I was maintaining almost all of the character rigs in the show. I also ran some cloth simulations on a few shots.

Specific assets that I rigged and/or maintained include:

• Siss Guards
• Wingnut

I also rigged shot specific rigs such as

• Milo's g-force face ripple.
• Two-Cat coiling up Milo.

Christmas Carol was my first feature film.  At the beginning of my employment I helped rig the low resolution layout rigs for use in Motion Builder.  This mostly consisted of weight painting and running batch scripts.  Once I learned how to use the Maya API, I quickly moved into the technical team of IMD's Rigging department where I created and collaborated on custom deformers using C++ and the Maya API, rig building scripts using Python, and dozens of animation, modeling, and shot finaling tools.  Most of these tools formed the basis of the deformation rigs on A Christmas Carol as well as part of the main rigging toolbox that we used at IMD.

I contributed heavily to the facial animation and deformation pipeline and helped create the rig that uses actor facial performance data to drive character face rigs.  Throughout A Christmas Carol, I was mainly in charge of developing and maintaining our Maya API toolset, building and supporting the facial rigs, and rigging some shot-specific special needs rigs.

Assets that I rigged and/or maintained include:

• Marley's Ghost face.
• The Ghost of Christmas Past face.
• The Ghost of Christmas Present face.
• The entire Cratchit family faces.
• Old Joe face.
• Portly businessmen faces.

I also rigged shot specific rigs such as

• Marley's jaw ripping off.
• Characters morphing into other characters
• The Ghost of Christmas Present's skull rig.