Endeavors in Technical Art
Although my degree is in programming, I have begun to explore more and more of the technical art world. I've always found myself divided between programming and art, and so this has always been a point of interest for me. I hope to continue updating this page as I experiment in it more frequently.
Houdini Tools for Malevolence Lane
As we developed the project, I first began to explore technical art by becoming acquainted with the Houdini program.
I created three different tools during that time - a cloth draping simulation, a prop destructor, and a bookshelf builder.
Learning the program was somewhat slow-going, and occasionally made me want to tear my hair out, but was invaluable. I got to figure out how Houdini worked, how to think like an artist, and what the tech art workflow is like.
I discussed it much more in detail in this LinkedIn article.
Animation in Unreal Engine 5
I made my interest in tech art well known as we started 666, and in turn many things that would be categorized that way were sent to me. The biggest example of this is animation for the project.
We started with assets from Mixamo, as many small studios I do. Artists did the work of selecting them and mapping them to the models, whilst I imported them. I sorted through import settings, created blend spaces (as seen to the left), and made all the necessary animation blueprints.
Once we were finally able to import our self-created motion capped animations, it fell on me to retarget the player meshes. It took a lot of late hours (as we were quite close to release) but in the end it was done. That version can be seen in the game and it's final trailer.