I thought it would be useful to show you some of my work and how I think it might fit with what your needs
Blackbox for Vision Pro
I worked with Shapes & Stories as a technical artist on the Apple Vision Pro version of Blackbox. We just won an Apple Design Award as the best game on the Vision Pro!
The problem facing S&S was that no one has any experience with Apple’s brand new shader tools, rendering engine or platform in general. They chose to work with my because of my confidence in how I approach problems… My default is “yes” and I have a lot of persistence to work within the limits I have.
You mentioned the your project would involve volumetric effects, these were far beyond what anyone had done on the Vision Pro to date. I managed to create this volumetric moving marble effect using only the face of a sphere. Since the effect is volumetric and it renders in stereo, it looks incredibly 3D as well!
GLASS – My Current iOS & VisionOS Project
I am currently working solo on a puzzle game for iOS and I have designed the visuals and shaders to be compatible with VisionOS in the future.
What is it?
The puzzle is to fill stained glass windows with only four colours, such that no colour touches itself.
Shaders and Tech Art:
The clouds have a volumetric effect and are procedurally generated with various noise layers.
The code allows the sky to be sampled from any view ray, either straight through an empty region or after the ray is refracted by the glass.
All this is done with no overdraw, no wasted drawing of clouds to a buffer (which is how one might achieve refraction normally) and therefore great performance.
The mesh generation is also worth drawing your attention to. The puzzles are defined as vector points and lines and then these 3d meshes are generated for the window’s metal lines and glass panes.
When the panes smash at a specific point, the mesh is split up and triangulated using my own multi-threaded logic.
It feels great to have the glass break exactly where you pressed it, but the mesh needs to be generated very quickly to minimise the delay in interaction.
Every shard of the resulting smash is actually baked into a single mesh. They are all moved separately as shards by the vertex shader, with a GPU physics simulation.
This is essential for performance vs creating hundreds of separate game objects in an instant. Also they are all draw in one draw call!
Other Work
Lumino City – Sole Programmer & Sole Technical Artist
- A Puzzle adventure game made from real cardboard models
- on iOS, tvOS & PC
- We won a BAFTA for “Artistic Achievement”
The whole game was made by hand, we used a robot arm to video and scan the model in multiple passes (lights on/off, doors open/close)
These were composited, blended or overlayed in different ways for each scene.
This taught me to think way outside the box.
It was exciting solving problems I hadn’t seen solved before.
KAMI & KAMI 2 – Programmer & Sole Technical Artist
- A beautiful puzzle game
- on iOS & Android
I am proud of the programmatic animation in the game, but I want to highlight my work on the paper texture.
Since the game was literally about once piece of paper, I wanted to make it the best piece of paper you’ve ever seen in a video game.
I wrote a tool that imports photos lit from different directions. It would then create an incredibly detailed normal map. You can even see the fluff on the paper catching the light at the right angle.
Here is a rough test I did with some cardboard on a cutting mat in our studio..
Recreated and lit in Unity.
Check out those ridges!
INKS – Programmer & Technical Artist
- An artistic take on pinball
- on iOS
- We won an “Apple Design Award”
The aesthetic of our yet-unnamed pinball game was taken in an inky direction since I was playing with metablob shaders in our R&D time.
The metablobs form the basis of the splat shape, then some GPU-based fluid dynamics take over to let the ink mix and flow.
I also did a cool thing where paint could splat the rolling ball, whilst also maintaining it’s 2d look.