I'm a Technical Artist at Rocket Gaming Systems.
I have experience in shader writing, tools creation, 3d programs, and traditional art.
Please scroll down to view my work. If you like what you
see, please contact me at shawny2005@gmail (dot) com
Morphing Vertex Shader
This vertex shader takes two different models and interpolates between the sets of vertices over a specified time. This allows a model to grow smoothly from one formation into another as if it was "morphing." This shader was written in HLSL as well as supported in C# with Microsoft's XNA Game Studio.
Pixel Shader Testbed
This is a selection of pixel shaders I created when working on
Alpha Morph.
Never having worked with shaders before, I had a week to learn shaders and understand the pipeline. This testbed
was created to prepare myself for creating the morphing vertex shader above.
Game Job Finder
This is a personal project that I began working on in the Fall of 2010. It helps automate the process of finding a job in the video game industry. This project is still a work in progress.
Old Site | New Site(no graphics yet)
I was looking for jobs in the games industry and was having a rough time finding much of anything I was qualified for. I exhausted places like creativeheads.com and gamejobhunter.com pretty quickly and started looking at job pages on several hundered company sites each week to see if there were any new jobs. I'm not going to lie, this took a lot more time than I wanted to devote to mindlessly clicking links. So I decide to script it. First, I wrote a standalone script to search a list of webpages and open pages to the sites that it found matches to. It only took a minute to run, and saved me a few hours a week. I was re-learning Python at the same time and thought, "All these sites (creativeheads.com) make companies fill out the same information that's on their company website all over again, what if I make this a web app to cut the middle man?" So I began looking into python's web functionality. This was a major learning process, but I got the server and site running pretty quickly. As you can see it's very slow, it takes 30 seconds to get your results. I needed it to be faster, I needed a database system. I chose Google App Engine, after looking at all the systems and I'm really glad I chose it. Although the site isn't visually finished, I have achieved a massive speed up. Where a single searchword took 30 seconds, I can have 10 search words take under a tenth of a second. I'm still working on this, but I've hit a snag in the design. Hopefully a new version will be up soon!
Maya/Panda3D Level Editor
While working as a research assistant on a simulation environment for the Game Intelligence Group, I spent most of my time writing scripts to aid the production process of PHD students. One of the most repetitive and time-wasting procedures was the placement of objects in our game world. We were constantly adding new models into the environment and guess-checking their coordinates. Since I had already created a xml based level editor for Softimage XSI, I ported the system over to Autodesk Maya 2008.
I must clarify there are two solutions below. The first solution I created is a level editor developed inside of Maya. After finishing the Maya solution, our team realized that not everyone who would be using our system would own a copy of Maya. The decision was made to create a stand-alone program in wxPython which allows for the importing of panda's native model files which can be created with any 3D software.
Maya Solution
wxPython Solution
Realtime Visual Debugger
This is a python script I created to aid the debugging process for one of our A.I. developers. Initially he was using the console for debug information, but was wasting a lot of time finding errors. This visual debugger eases that task.
Update: The video above is a second version my marker system. I used a common Panda3D tutorial for my basic game world, and incorporated my marker system into it. The class is modular, and can display virtually any information it's provided.
