School Reel 2008

This is my student demo reel from attending the Vancouver Institute of Media Arts. The flash video below is meant to be a streaming preview (click on it to play.) For a high quality version please download a video from one of the following links. (Right click and save as...)

Quicktime (large) (170mb)
Quicktime (small) (58mb)
AVI (zipped) (208mb)






Demo Reel Description:

Forgotten Jungle:

This is an out door level, set in the east-Asian jungles near Angkor Wat. The original design was inspired by Naughty Dog’s PS3 game “Uncharted: Drakes Fortune.” This project details my knowledge of low poly modeling, transparency mapping, and creating simple environmental animation loops. Many rocks and foliage are instances. Texture sizes have also been optimized for best performance. This level could easily run on a 6th generation gaming console, the Wii, and possibly even the PSP. Modeled, lit and rendered in Maya, sculpted in ZBrush, textured in Photoshop. Most shadows and occlusions are baked. (6 weeks)

Urban Classroom:

Set in the interior of an empty room during the golden hour this scene was created primarily to show my modeling and lighting skills. Based on a real school I went to I wanted to bring to the viewer a realistic sense of aw and tranquility. Lighting was done by hand; didn't use any final gather or global illumination type algorithms . Modeled in Maya, then textured in Photoshop. Added lights in Maya, then fixed textures based on lighting. Rendered using Mental Ray with ray tracing. (8 weeks)

The Planetarium:

This was a collaborative project between four other friends and myself. We made a playable level based off of Epic’s “Unreal Tournament 3” game. I was a technical artist and designer on the team. Some of my tasks included pipeline integration, troubleshooting, layout and design, inspecting meshes and UVs for problems, importing assets into the engine from Maya, creating character/environment animations, creating particles/effects, NIS, scripting in game events, configuring dynamics, etc. (10 weeks including learning Unreal Editor)