Dynamic Physics

• Hired at Ready at Dawn to learn proprietary physics engine Abel.

• Became the go-to physics authority for other departments in 6 months.

• Tackled all the unique physics content challenges or any situations that required custom problem solving.

• Authored advanced physics content including all of the simulated hair, most layered clothing, and player rag dolls.

• Consulted with the engine team on what new features would be most helpful for authoring physics and optimizing content.

• Brainstormed with engine team how to implement some features under the hood like ‘squashed sphere effects’, bumpable furniture that is not moveable, etc.

Art/Props

• Created destructible versions of most of the props in the game.

• Authored fragmented versions of the pristine art and reapplied existing materials to new interior faces by recycling parts of the textures.

• Optimized collision with cheap and robust convex hulls packed with collision spheres. Particle FX were used to fill out the rest of the destruction.

• Reduced draw calls to the GPU by keeping them combined in Maya, despite simulating as 1-3 separate pieces.

• This workflow helped save the art team from spending a bunch of extra time making damaged versions of props, while giving me artistic and technical autonomy over how props were destroyed.

Level Collision

• Created level collision templates for artists to easily author common types of collision.

• Collision templates bypassed the need to keep worrying about settings while working on content, ensured consistency, error proofing, and let us easily update types of collision across the entire game. They were color-coded for visual clarity.

• Authored level collision for several parts of the game.

• Taught others how to author level collision. This included simplifying advanced engine concepts like k-DOPs, sparse grids, etc. to help artists better optimize for our engine.