Recently I’ve been working on making more complicated effects, and this project was a magic effect that I created in Houdini using several different pyro simulations. I gained a lot of experience with creating controllers for several different parts of an effect and separating it into several parts in order to have better control of every aspect of the smoke. This was not created for any one specific project, but I would love to clean it up and set it somewhere in the future. I modeled some Haniwa (clay sculptures that house spirits) around it to give it a bit of a theme, and made a magical circle design on the ground. I may revisit this in the future, but this was a ton of fun to work on and made me significantly more comfortable in working with volumes and stylized effects.

More details available in portfolio here.

I love playing chess and for practice I decided to create a self-playing chess board. This project is done using Houdini and Python to procedurally play out a chess game with any different size or parameters. The idea came from creating a tool that would allow me to simulate endless possibilities of chess games, and as my interests changed, I focused towards adding VFX and interesting ways to show chess games with different parameters.

This game is accurate to the rules of chess, and it was a lot of fun to find different ways to show a chessboard. I was a chess tutor growing up, and this was a fun project to show all of the possibilities with chess games!

Wave Chocolate is a fictional chocolate brand that creates milk chocolate caramel candies! I worked to create the brand image from scratch in order to create a mock commercial. This was great experience working with fluid simulations and creating a brand and commercial from scratch. I don’t imagine Wave Chocolate ever being made, but I would love to work on similar projects for an actual client so this was great practice!

More details on the “Wave Chocolate” series in my portfolio here.

In the Spring of 2022, I worked alongside four other students to create an animated short. I had a large role in the effects, modeling, and surfacing of the short, and it was a great experience in creating an animated short in a small timeframe. We used ShotGrid, Maya, Houdini, Substance, Nuke, DaVinci Resolve, and plenty of other tools in our pipeline and this was a great experience in creating a project from scratch with no premade assets.

Wave Chocolate is a fictional chocolate brand that creates milk chocolate caramel candies! I worked to create the brand image from scratch in order to create a mock commercial. This was great experience working with fluid simulations and creating a brand and commercial from scratch. I don’t imagine Wave Chocolate ever being made, but I would love to work on similar projects for an actual client so this was great practice!

More details on the “Wave Chocolate” series in my portfolio here.

This is a remastered version of the first animation that I made in undergraduate about a small robot and a large slot machine. I remade all of the assets and used various tools to help with animation. I developed a slot machine simulator for animating the slots as well as various expressions to handle animated lights in various patterns.

Nodevember is a challenge in November where you make procedural content out of nodes every two days in November. This prompt was my interpretation of “Psychadellic Alley” where I made a bowling alley that will warp with neon lights. It was fun getting the bowling ball to properly roll down the alley and hop along the way as it goes over the humps! I had a lot of fun working on a ton of small projects, and am looking forward to next November.

More details on my Nodevember 2022 projects in my portfolio here.

A Houdini vellum piece rendered with Redshift. I experimented with several methods of closing a package with Houdini Vellum and decided for this abstract rendition.