Portfolio

Animation

I'm a technically oriented artist with over seven years' experience using 3D Studio Max to create characters, special effects and environments. Combined with other graphic tools such as Photoshop, I can UVW unwrap models and create the textures, along with bump, normal and Parallax maps. I have an understanding of edge flows for efficiency, and LOD editing to help with the environment creation.

My most notable work to date involves my car rig, which can be viewed in detail here. Its purpose is to aid the animation of car rigs, and this is demonstrated in several videos, including my Lego BBC F1 Intro animation, which has also been uploaded onto YouTube and unexpectedly received over 5,000 views in its first week following increasing popularity among communities and broadcasters - it was even linked to on the BBC F1 website homepage for a while.

I have knowledge of a wide variety of programs and applications, including 3D Studio Max and Maya, game engines, After Effects, and Photoshop. I am able to create technically accurate models from blueprints as well as objects and characters from concept art, UVW unwrap and texture, then animate them realistically.

My Masters degree in animation for computer games involved creating a cityscape project in the Unreal Tournament 3 engine to form the base of a game, and to be able to control elements such as time of day and dynamic weather effects using Windows Forms in C++. Work on a Left 4 Dead game server has allowed custom content for Source engine games among a small team.

A technically oriented approach has resulted in my taking a planning and coordination role in group projects - for example ensuring programmers receive assets in a reasonable time, and my website skills have been used to help communication among groups by creating an interactive page with upload options and to-do lists to check progress. I have been responsible for the working out of methods to exporting models into planned game engines by liaising between artists and programmers, experimenting with test exports and then creating tutorials from the results.


My car rig, created using MAXscript, allows vehicles to be quickly rigged and animated autonomously for any four-wheeled vehicle, which I can model efficiently and accurately from blueprints.

As well as created scripted and simulated physics animations, I'm also able to animate characters and objects realistically through key frames and motion capture. Evidence of rigging and skinning characters using bone objects, skeletons and custom rigs can be found here.