portlyfolio

[portlyfolio]

I took and thoroughly enjoyed a truly wonderful course in animation production pipeline that gave me an introduction and overview to how animated films are made. I learned about how to design a character that visually complements its personality, its role in the story, and the world it belongs to. I learned to find references and make storyboards. I learned the basics of box modeling, sculpting and retopologizing, rigging, Python scripting to automate part of the rigging, animation and rendering. It really helped me begin to understand the role of a 3D artist in animation which I think is the first step to understanding how best to build software that supports their work.

I'm responsible for all aspects of the final video except for the background image and original audio files for the sound effects.

Platforms: Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Arnold

[portlyfolio]

PicoCTF 2019 Web Game, CyLabs, and Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), Carnegie Mellon University

Platforms: Unity WebGL, C#

My Role: Artist & Writer, programming help during crunch time

Built in four months with team of four

Out of the four of us, three of us had programming backgrounds and none of us had art backgrounds. I opted to be the artist/writer to better understand the role I wanted to eventually support and work closely with. Though I was working with simple 2D pixel art assets and animations, I still learned a lot by trying to work with the mindset of an artist, and think about what an artist would be concerned with - how user-friendly is the color scheme, does the main character pop against the backgrounds of all the rooms, is the atmosphere of the environment fitting for the story, are the assets sizes small enough, does the asset import properly into the game, etc.

What I did

Wrote game story and wrote Python scripts for streamlining the process of updating dialogue in the game with each draft of the story

Created all pixel art sprite sheets and animations based on designer specifications and iterated artwork based on client feedback

Collaborated with two other programmers as needed and during crunch time coding game functionality like hidden objects and end credits

[portlyfolio]

Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), Carnegie Mellon UniversityBuilding Virtual Worlds (BVW), 2018 Platforms: Makey Makey, Oculus, Unity, C# Scope: Built in three weeks with team of five My role: Programmer

“Blender Friender”

A two-person experience where one guest is a blender in VR and the other guest sends fruit to the blender with a control panel made from real fruit.

What I did:

Design the experience with the team

Fruit conveyor belt script and effects

Cup-filling and water overflow script and effects

Leader board and score saving

Sound and art asset placement and integration

The physical prop for the Makey Makey fruit panel, including the electrical wiring

Particularly proud of:

I had the idea to use a static wrist strap to ground the guests so they could play with two hands

I made good use of cardboard prototypes before the final the wood prop to improve on the placement of the fruit

I made well-timed animations for the virtual cup and fruit panel that seemed to help testers understand the game better

My collaborators, all brilliant:

Xuhao Du Nidhi Ramanathan Yi Ting (Kristy) Tsai Anying Zheng

[portlyfolio]

Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), Carnegie Mellon University

Building Virtual Worlds (BVW), 2018

Platforms: Vive VR, Vive Trackers, Unity, C#

Built in two weeks with team of five

“Through the Storm”

I worked with two artists, a sound designer and another programmer to create a VR experience where the guest becomes small and rides a caterpillar through a fantasy land.

What I did

Design the experience with the team

Caterpillar navmesh and waypoint following with Unity Standard Assets

Work with the other programmer (Parker Ramsey) to detect leaf-umbrella prop tracker position robustly enough for guests unfamiliar with the experience

Manipulate saturation with Unity post processing to help mood

Integrate sound and art assets as needed for best possible experience

[portlyfolio]

Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), Carnegie Mellon University

Building Virtual Worlds (BVW), 2018

Platforms: Kinect, Unity, C#

Built in two weeks with team of five

“Photoshoot from Hell”

I worked with two artists, a sound designer and another programmer to create a Kinect game where the guest are fashionable skeletons, shakes away pesky spiders and bats before posing for their photoshoot.

What I did

Design the experience with the team

Write the programs detecting rapid joint shaking given data from the Kinect

Write the game main state machine and integrate assets as needed

[portlyfolio]

Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), Carnegie Mellon University

Building Virtual Worlds (BVW), 2018

Platforms: Meta II AR, Unity, C#

Built in two weeks with team of five

“Weather or Not”

I worked with two artists, a sound designer and another programmer to create an AR experience where the guest acts as the Rain God of an island, raining on the island villagers with clouds that follow his hand.

What I did

Design the experience with the team

Write the programs for the clouds using the Meta’s hand detection (cloud particle system by Trace Dressen)

Write the programs for pirate ships firing canons (pirate ship models by Conor Tripplet) and other game-play and assets integration as needed

[portlyfolio]

Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), Carnegie Mellon University

Building Virtual Worlds (BVW), 2018

Platforms: Vive VR, Vive trackers, Unity, C#

Built in two weeks with team of five

“Me & My Yodeling Treeman”

I worked with two artists, a sound designer and another programmer to create an experience where the guests plants a tree in VR then protect it from vicious woodpeckers annoyed by its enthusiastic yodeling.

What I did

Design the experience with the team

Calibrate Vive tracker on virtual bat

Transitions with Unity post processing profile 

Integrating art assets as needed

Assets placement

[portlyfolio]

Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), Carnegie Mellon University

Building Virtual Worlds (BVW), 2018

Platforms: PC, Unity, C#

Individual Project

“Heaven”

A simple project we built individually at the start of the semester to familiarize us with programs we’ll be using. This was my first Unity project; I thought it would be cool to make a maze/puzzle game that imagines a severe, mysterious, almost sterile Heaven in the spirit of Supernatural.

All assets but the doors are downloaded free from the Unity Asset store and put to use creatively.

[portlyfolio]

My undergrad thesis where I wrote a program that changes human skin colour to match another’s.

The motivation here is that we have a nail polish try-on app that uses a model hand to demonstrate the appearance of nail polish - we want to be able to adjust the skin colour of the model hand to whatever the user’s skin colour is. That way, the user has a better idea how the nail polish will look on themselves.

This sort of skin colour matching and correcting is actually a pretty common task for people who edit photos. The challenge here is to do it automatically, without the help of a human making judgments about how to adjust the colours. It’s not as simple as adjusting brightness - for it to look natural we had to do things like avoiding dark lines and bright spots.

It still needs work for big colour changes! One of the things I learned was how unforgiving changes to skin colour can be - unless you get it just right, it can look very unnatural.

[portlyfolio]

I volunteered for a while as poster and flyer-maker for a community theatre, and this was one of the posters I felt like I made what I’d set out to make. The play is called Foxfinder, about the happenings at a farmhouse in a dystopian society where every problem is blamed on the elusive foxes... yet nobody even remembers how they look anymore. 

The idea of blaming foxes was so interesting to me, I decided that it would really draw attention if I put a giant fox on the poster, so that the first thing to cross the wandering mind of anyone who saw it would be “fox”. And so... ta da!

I’m still pretty inexperienced at making posters for theatre though, and one of the things I wish I had done was look more at the great posters that have already been made. I made this poster while relatively blind to the tradition of craft that I was attempting.

[portlyfolio]

For our fourth year engineering project, my team made a item tracker prototype we imaginatively named “Trove” (As in “treasure trove”. As in “important items”. Um.)

The idea is, we attach RFID tags to important items, then create a scanner that we attach to a bag. Every time an item passes through the bag, the scanner takes note and transmits a notification to a cellphone app. The cool part about tags is that they are “passive” - they don’t need any power to respond to the scanner - this makes it different from some of the Bluetooth item trackers out there. 

It actually works! Since I forget things a lot, I could totally see myself using it for a plane trip or something.

I have officially become the app person at this point, so I coded the Android app, whose main functionality is diagramed above with screenshots. I designed it too! Started with an Illustrator mockup and everything. It’s not as easy as it looks. Also, I swear I came up with that single circle at the bottom before the Dropbox app started doing it.

[portlyfolio]

I spent one awesome summer as a visiting student at the MIT Energy-Efficient Circuits and Systems Group where I helped test the power output of piezoelectric energy harvesters.

What they are, the brown strips shown in the images, are things that generate electric current when they are vibrated. The idea is you can use these things to power sensors attached to motors or other machines that vibrate. Normally, you would have to keep changing batteries for these sensors, but if the harvesters can power the sensors, then they can harvest the energy from the vibration of the motors they are monitoring. The whole idea of harvesting energy from the environment is just really cool. Imagine a thing just sitting there soaking up the energy it needs from the surroundings!

The top picture is the set up we used to test the harvester, images below shows some of the things I learned to do - I learned about circuits that maximize the power output of the harvesters, how to lay up a PCB, and how to use MATLAB code to automate experiments and take measurements.

[portlyfolio]

I had my very first experience with research at the Institute for Optical Sciences at the University of Toronto. I remember when I was brought past one of the chemistry labs with all its test tubes and churning instruments and thinking to myself, well, this is exactly how I pictured being a scientist would be like.

I spent that summer collecting light-absorption data on samples of different concentrations of nanoparticles and dye and then analyzing the results with MATLAB. We were trying to determine exactly what was happening in the solution at different concentration of nanoparticle and dye, since the particular nanoparticles were this new, awesome thing that we didn’t know all the properties of.

The above is the poster I made at the end of the summer.

[portlyfolio]

Our second year engineering project where we build a robot to automatically fill a box with yellow and white ping-pong balls in a certain pattern. The entire thing by volume is maybe 90% scrap wood, 8% hot glue, 1% old denim (for the conveyor belt), 0.5% stepper motor, 0.4% wire and 0.1% microcontroller.

The whole thing actually works! Though it looks like a Goldberg machine and is only somewhat more reliable.

I wrote the code for the microcontroller in assembly, but we ended up using the C code from our circuitry team member. I also helped with the construction and design of the mechanisms, though it really wasn’t my forté - but needs must! That’s me on the right, grinning like an idiot after a sleepless night of writing up the report, which I won’t post here because I’m aware that absolutely no one wants to read it.

This experience taught me several things:

1) It’s good to know, but I’m probably never going to actually need to write assembly code for anything.

2) It’s worth using durable material for reliability. The robot almost completely broke down because a tiny sliver of hot glue got jammed in the works.

3) As long as we have motors controllable by electric pulses and microcontrollers that can generate those pulses according to the software we write, as long as we can connect computerized thoughts to mechanical limbs, we can make a robot that does anything. Isn’t that amazing?

[portlyfolio]

I found an artist, Aaron Griffin, that draws portraits in a style that I really loved and since he very kindly uploaded his Photoshop brushes, I downloaded them and copied (top left) one of his drawings (top right) to try to learn his process and how to use the brushes. Then I drew portraits of my own (bottom). The reference for the bottom drawing is a screen-capture from the T.V. show Supernatural, a moment which I thought highlighted a really important trait of the character - he is a soldier loyal to a cause.

I’ve really enjoyed learning to draw faces. The process has taught me a lot about light, shadows, textures, colours, and human anatomy. I’m know there’s more I haven’t yet fathomed. I never knew so much could go into a drawing until I tried it.

[portlyfolio]

I did my university internship year at ModiFace and it was awesome.

I helped program Android apps that did cool things like putting highly realistic-looking makeup on photos of people’s faces. It’s brilliant isn’t it? You can test what make up looks good on you without smearing it hurriedly over your face at the store.

Those that shop make up a lot will probably have noticed that tech for cosmetics is everywhere these days - skin tone matchers, virtual mirrors... but I think the company ModiFace started doing what it does before it was popular. It’s the real deal.

I didn’t even know this stuff was called augmented reality at the time, but this was when I realized that this would be an awesome field of computer science to work in.

Top: Screenshot of a wedding dress try-on app I programmed still up on Google Play. I learned some OpenGL ES for the backend and made the front end according to the specifications of the graphic designer.

Bottom: Screenshot of a make up try-on app for Lakmé I helped to program. I was mostly programming the user-interface, making sure that it matched up exactly with the specifications. (I may also have spent some time fangirling over the pictures of the Bollywood stars that were used as models).

[portlyfolio]

These are some rough drawings that I decided I kind of liked. Both were drawn in Procreate on a tablet using That One Good Free Brush.

Top: The feeling we often get looking at far-away buildings from tall places.

Bottom: A scene from science fiction novel the Dispossessed that stuck in my mind. The story is about a young scientist growing up living on the relatively barren twin planet of a wealthy main planet.