Multiplayer VR Games
Echo Arena plays as ultimate frisbee in zero gravity. Punching stuns opponents, forcing them to drop the disk.
Echo Combat was a zero gravity shooter with various weapons and tactical gadgets. Game modes included King of the Hill and Push Cart payload maps.
Echo VR Lobby was an environment built to connect you to Arena and Combat as well as managing friends, practicing, trying weapons, customizing characters, etc.
02/2015 - 07/2017
Echo VR
Reviewed, cleaned up, optimized, and updated lobby level collision to match architectural changes to the layout.
Created prop physics and prop LODs for numerous toys ranging from the arena disk, Velcro-tipped foam darts and a dart board, dinosaur toys, snow balls, decorative banners, to a remote control toy space ship that you steer around the room.
Rigged some animated or mechanical props, like a toy train that ran along on a track embedded in a seasonally themed lobby.
Modified character art and UVs on costume rigs to support dynamic patterns as part of character customization.
Helped optimize android rigs for the Oculus Quest.
06/2018 - 08/2023
Animation Rigging
Trained under lead rigger during production.
Helped plan out how to collapse components for a rocket launcher weapon, dubbed the "Meteor".
Rigged the final art for that weapon as it unfolds from your hand. It was a good exercise in making believable mechanical transformations despite substantially changing in volume.
Used motions to obscure squashing and stretching parts to compactify them as they folded up and telescoped.
Created LODs for about half of the character costumes and android chassis added to the game via battle pass updates.
Authored unique topology, UVs, and texture bakes for LODs.
Rigging experience enabled me to design topology that lent itself to preserving their silhouettes when skinned and animated with a full range of motion.
Each costume generally had 3 to 4 different tiers of LODs. Tuned the distances for swapping to those different tiers.
Recycled for LODs between Rift and Quest tiers when it made sense.
Checked over character art files for costumes to make sure they were compliant with the rigging department's needs, were clean, and free of modeling errors like holes or lamina faces.
Rigging Philosophy
A good rig automates as much as possible in order to make animators' lives as easy as possible while keeping the controls simple.
A guilty pleasure in making rigs mathematically precise. For example, when the toy train in Echo lobby was moved by animators, the wheels would spin the exact amount needed to avoid any slipping.
Keeping open communication with animators to stay informed of their needs for props, and making sure I understood cinematic sequences. Hypothetically, the animators might have wanted the ability to make the wheels slip if the train started moving or came to a stop. If that had been the case, I would have needed to add logic and control support for a 'spin offset' to the wheel rotation.
