Created as part of a class project in Visualization and Animation: my group decided on creating a short animation based on the subject of creating compelling atmospheric visuals, rather than telling a true narrative story. We ended up with a concept involving a probe from an alien spaceship landing on a world which once held sentient life. The probe would fly around a view various scenes of ruins, etc. This shot comes early in the film, and was entirely my work: the spaceship approaches the planet.

Another still from an early shot, entirely my work: the spaceship hovers over the planet, preparing to release the planetary entry pod.

Still from a shot, Entirely my work: interior of the spaceship.

Still from a shot, Entirely my work: entry pod going through atmospheric entry.

Still from a shot. Entirely my work except for modelling of probe (small spherical flying thing in mid right): Probe flies toward ruined bridge.

Prayer was a project that myself and my good friend Troy Lawlor worked on together while we were both working toward our undergraduate degrees at UAF. It was created to showcase the programming talent of Troy and the artistic talent of myself. We created a development pipeline to get art assets into his engine: I created models in Alias Maya, and then exported the mesh in the directx .x format. Animations were also created in Maya, then exported as sdk files (most notably used by the Half-Life game series). Target polycounts were low by today's standards, with most models not reaching over 900 faces. Buildings and related geometry were created with Valve Hammer and then converted into Quake3 bsp files. I created all of the models used in the engine except for a few procedurally generated spheres and cubes, and most of the buildings. Many characters were created for the project, including Broger who you can see in the screenshot above.

Prayer called for a distinctive art style that fit somewhere between fantasy, modern-day, and grizzled future. Concept art (done by myself and our friends Malia and Jason, along with my brother David) helped to guide me in the production of art assets.

Troy requested a model of "some sort of flying creature for the player to ride, and as a test enemy." Seeing as how everybody likes a good dragon/drake/wyvern type creature, I thought it would be fun to create one for our testing. I drew some concept, got to work, and produced this.

These creatures were the first to terrorize the player in the test build. Of course, since their AI hadn't been written yet, they just sort've... floated there. But they were menacing about it.

Based off a concept drawn by my brother David, this Drilling Mech was created as a vehicle for the player.

This buggy became our first drivable vehicle.

As I mentioned above, buildings were created in Valve Hammer and then (through a series of conversions) exported as Quake 3 bsps. I created many buildings for the Prayer project to use as test environments in the game, and my brother designed a few more (including the marvelous Cathedral visible in some of the screenshots below). I also created all the textures used in the buildings. Textures were especially tricky, because all exterior faces had to work with one texture set, and all "interior" faces had to work on another. This distinction was made so that the lighting engine could be simplified: environmental (outdoor) lighting would only be applied to exterior faces, and the interior faces would be lit by lights in the bsp.

And finally here is a selection of ingame shots that highlight my work in the engine. More screenshots and indepth analysis can be seen at Troy Lawlor's Prayer Webpage.

Stills from a short animation created for a Digital Video Compositing class. The assignment was to composite live-action footage onto CG backgrounds. I set up and lit a greenscreen shot with a friend, then composited the footage into the 3d scenes.

Stills from an animation created for a Visualization and Animation class. I created a short fantasy themed animation in which various characters interact with an clicé evil wizard. The shots are (in order): main character, main character with magical object, evil wizard casting spell, main character, evil wizard casting summoning spell (ice), evil wizard casting closeup, ice elemental.

This work is an homage to René Magritte's "Empire of Lights." Magritte was my favorite surrealist painter, and I wanted to create an image that invoked the same sense of unreality as those in his "Empire of Lights" series.