This page gathers together technical art tools, personal projects and development challenges that don’t really fit anywhere else. Older experiments in Unity and Unreal can be found on the ‘Realtime’ page, but I’ve decided to leave that page ‘as-is’, and separate the two by time.
These were part of a verification test for physically plausible lighting (PPL) in lumen / UE5, as well as an exercise in rapid kitbashing. Each environment was created in around 4hrs from existing assets.
Houdini tool for generating spherical normals and pre-baked AO for foliage. Left is a tree with default normals – right is one with spherical normals. Was used on Avatar:TLA, primarily in the palace environments.
I kept running into megascans assets that didn’t scatter well, since the exterior edge wasn’t flat. This is a very simple HDA to automatically select and warp a scanned mesh so the outside edge lies on flat ground plane.
This was a project to train a machine learning system in terrain erosion, to speed up the process of landscape creation. It used a dataset from Washington in the US, and a custom version of ‘Pix2pix’. While the results looked promising, the resolution (256×256) wasn’t high enough to be useful, and turned into more a learning exercise than a production-ready tool.
This was another ML project, aimed at generating building footprints for my ‘Greenhouse’ tool. I eventually ended up writing a differentiable SVG renderer in an attempt to make the training fast enough to run on my home machine. Another interesting exercise, which turned into more of an academic challenge than something robust enough to actually do anything useful (an ongoing theme with ML tools).
Because Gaussian Splats are basically just a pointcloud with fancy point attributes, I wanted to see how easy they were to edit in Houdini. This example takes a splat from PolyCam, cleans it up in Houdini, and renders it in Unreal. Not quite performant enough to beat polygons just yet, but it’s a promising workflow for the future.
A relatively complex tool to take a tree without a pre-built skeleton, and automatically rig it with curves for wind simulation. The result was encoded as a texture using SideFX’s VAT tools, and used in several projects in Unreal. The limit for this workflow is about 300,000 tris, but the result is very render efficient.
‘Shortest Path’ alien growth simulation for a location-based entertainment pitch. The growth would shrink in light, and grow in darkness, and the guests would ‘fight’ the infestation using tracked torches and other light sources. The aim was to make a fast-paced co-op experience without resorting to the usual ‘give people guns’ approach.
Further tests in rotating, blending and combining multiple Gaussian splats together – this example blends 3 splats scanned in various locations around Bowen Island.
Cloud renders from Terragen, created for a ‘four point’ sprite shader in Unreal
Cloudscape using the ‘four point’ shader material, created as a proof of concept for the Appa flying shots in Avatar: The Last Airbender. The material also included a depth-based shadow system, so the flat cards would shadow each other.
Virtual forest fire created for a pre-rendered car process shot for Scarab Digital / ‘Fire Country’. I created 4 looping VDB sequences in Embergen and Houdini – which were then duplicated around 400 times across the 2 minute sequence.
Megascans have become so ubiquitous in CG that some of the most used assets are now very easy to spot! This is a tool to automatically generate layered material masks in substance, and allow scanned assets to be easily repurposed for different biomes.
This example takes a detailed scan with a relatively featureless material, and repurposes it as an undersea rock formation covered in barnacles and seaweed.