I am a game designer, computer scientist, and game developer, with a fondness for both the realistic and abstract visuals that can be produced by computers. I recently completed my Master's thesis in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as part of the co-terminal program, a 4+1 bachelors and masters program. My undergraduate degree is in Computer Science with a dual major in Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences. My research focused on physics-based animation of a humanoid character, as described in more detail here. Other areas of interest include non-photorealistic rendering, realistic lighting techniques, landscape and city generation, participating media, and hardware acceleration of graphics techniques.
Game Design
My game design interests are varied, but I tend to create games with short storylines that incorporate an interesting visual effect, usually with puzzle-based or competitive games with very little story. I enjoy incorporating non-photorealistic techniques into games, such as the watercolor effect used in Mar. In past situations, given a game project to be completed, I have found a way to make the project something I enjoy and will be proud of, whether the genre, style, or type of game is something I normally play or not. One of my ambitions is to create an MMORPG, though I also aspire to work on a competitive game and short story based titles.
Outside of Work
Outside of work I am an avid martial artist and have practiced Tae Kwon Do, Eskrima, and most recently Capeoira. Additionally I amuse myself with origami, playing music on flute and piano, and fiddling with various code projects. I am also a gamer, playing League of Legends consistently, though I have in the past played numerous MMORPGs such as FlyFF, Cabal, Rappelz, Megaten, Lord of the Rings Online, and Guild Wars 2. I have also played a fair share of Team Fortress 2 and Terraria, and made my way through a number of single player games, my favorites of which include Spyro the Dragon, Jak and Daxter, Mirror's Edge, Antichamber, Limbo, Borderlands, Thomas Was Alone, and Dishonored. The list of games I like and have played is constantly growing and changing.
1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.
2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.
3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.
4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.
J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was before that a producer and writer for a number of cartoons in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (The Real Ghostbusters and the original She-Ra, most notably). After a few years of dealing with the censors and their obsession with finding Satanism (or at least looking for Satanism to further political agendas) he wrote an article about the whole corrupt and bullshit system.
And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?
That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:
(As he goes on to say, he’s never worked in animation again–he’s effectively been blacklisted by the cartoon industry.)
Every time something like this comes up, I remember two stories about making media. The first is about movies, and comes from Quentin “Feet Man” Tarantino.
When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.
The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.
The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.
There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.
This is true of all censorship.
I’ve been a professional designer for 8 years and that last bit is so true. In addition to politics, a huge part of people meddling with creative work is just ego. They want to feel like they had a hand in the final product, even though they not only did not create it but are in fact incapable of creating something on that level. So they reach their hand into someone else’s work and command it to change, not in service of a mutual artistic goal, but simply because they have the power to do so and they like feeling that power.
very common tactic for designs budgets etcdo something crazy then do what you wanted
Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven’t been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it’s built directly into the Chrome browser. It’s been in the news previously as “FLoC” and then the “Topics API,” and despite widespread opposition from just about every non-advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome and is one of the world’s biggest advertising companies, so this is being railroaded into the production builds.
This is a response to the laws that eliminate or severely limit third party tracking cookies. Since Google makes so much money on advertising, it had to figure out other ways to get your data. It’s already been tracking people who use the web while logged into Google, but now they’re baking it into Chrome.
As someone who works in advertising, the reason I new use Firefox is because I heard the industry rumblings about this for the last 3 years. It’s finally here, so if you care about making it harder to be tracked/advertised to, switch to Firefox.
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
hilarious decision to force on mainstream media execs and marketingdo you accept that everything in your fandom is lgbt and give queer repor do you respect female/femme presenting peoplewe SHOULD be picking both but your average marketing department tries to pick neither
The health insurance industry has a term for this sadistic practice. It’s called “step therapy.” If the choice is between a more expensive medication that works and a cheaper one that doesn’t work as well and might have worse side effects, the insurance company requires that the cheaper drug be used first.
One benefit to the insurance company is that the patient on the cheaper drug might die before they get a chance to use the drug that works but is more expensive. That’s money in the bank for the insurance company.
Or, the patient might be so worn down and harmed by the cheaper drug that they just give up the fight to get the drug that will help them. Again, that’s bank for the insurance company.
Some rando: You should think about stopping your prescription
Me: My pills make me not want to die tho
They: You shouldn’t want to die, that’s not normal
Me: Yeah that’s why I’m taking my pills
Again: But you aren’t the *real* you when you’re on your pills
Me: I’m the alive version of me
An actual doctor, once: “Relying On A Chemical Crutch For A Hormonal Imbalance Denies The Fortitude Of The Human Soul”
Me: Cool so like I’m agnostic
They: “But you might be on pills the rest of your life!”
Me: “So?”
Good! That means that I have a “rest of” my life to continue living!
Thanks to the pills.
Meanwhile, no person ever: “You should think about giving up your insulin/antiretrovirals/beta blockers/anti-rejection drugs/prosthetic legs/daily multivitamin, because using those your whole life is bad for some reason”
Oh no, they do that too.
I have a kidney transplant. A woman once told me she didn’t believe in organ transplants and that people should just die when they’re meant to.
Sounds like a great set-up for a murder
People who are fully healthy, fit and neurotypical seem to think they are that way because they’re doing something right that the rest of us haven’t thought of, and not just because they got lucky
Speaking of the luck of the non-disabled…I once terrorized a Karen who was using me to teach her entitled kid that disabled people are Other and should not be treated with respect. I told her (truthfully) that until I was twenty-eight, I wasn’t visibly disabled. Then a defective chromosome that I hadn’t known about kicked in. So my luck ran out. But until then, I had been normal–just…like…her.
The sheer terror on her face as the concept of “You mean I’ve just been lucky so far?” seeped into her brain was a thing of beauty.
People who are fully healthy, fit and neurotypical seem to think they are that way because they’re doing something right that the rest of us haven’t thought of, and not just because they got lucky
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
“You are one stroke of bad luck, common viral illness, or traumatic event away from being just like me” is honestly the most terrifying thing you can tell an abled person - and you should. I was healthy and fit and doing everything ‘right’ too - right up until some inner switch flipped and my body crumbled right out from under me.
And to be quite frank, it’s exceptionally rare to reach old age and NOT have some kind of disability. Even if don’t have any congenital disability nor contract an illness nor suffer a traumatic injury…you can just get old and your body starts falling apart but not all at once, even if you do everything right.
The goal was to produce a hand-drawn effect on rendered scenes in real time, comparing combinations of a cel-shaded effect, outline drawing through two different techniques, and a modified version of the hatching technique from Real-Time Hatching. The effects were produced using Cg shaders, with the OGRE 3D engine handling rendering, scene management, mesh and texture loading, and passing of values to the shaders.
We created two algorithms for producing a cel-shaded appearance, each creating step functions to limit the number of shades. The first method applied the step function to the RGB channels, while the second converted the colors to HSL space before applying the function to the saturation and lightness channels. Outlines were produced first through the use of a Sobel filter, applied as a post-processing effect, and secondly by re-rendering the geometry scaled slightly larger and culling front-faces. Hatching was produced with the method outlined in the paper, blending between toroidal mip-mapped textures with different auto-generated patterns of hatch marks to shade the model.
Implementation based on Parallel Controllable Texture Synthesis (Hoppe et al.)
The goal was to synthesize deterministic patches of texture from a small example patch. Our main source was Parallel Controllable Texture Synthesis (Lefebvre and Hoppe), though we deviated from their method due to time constraints (2 week long project). Our final results are still wanting, so we plan to continue work when schedules allow for it.
The general idea of our method is to replicate the patch to produce a larger image, upsampling the patch by making a texture where each pixel corresponds to a coordinate in the exemplar. These coordinates are then jittered, and for each pixel in the generated image, the neighborhood is compared to the exemplar's neighborhood and corrected so as to produce similar patterns to those found in the exemplar. Our method still falls short on producing results that are consistently similar to the exemplar, often producing noticeably anomalous regions. We also do not have any compensation for textures with regular, structured patterns, such as bricks, where warping is noticeable.
Deferred rendering pipeline with basic game engine components
This was yet another project I made with my friend Matt for a class. The idea was to try and get a photon mapping implementation as outlined in Hardware Accelerated Global Illumination by Image Space Photon Mapping (McGuire and Luebke). The deferred rendering component was primarily my doing, with Matt creating the texture loading and error libraries.
At the moment, this is my goto code when I need something rendered. Features include texture loading, obj model loading, direct and deferred rendering, a ray tracing component, shader loading and compilation, and a rudimentary scene graph. There are also libraries for vector math, matrix math, and quaternion calculations, for transforming vertices. The photon mapping implementation is incomplete and as I use this code to experiment, not all of it us functional. The initial push for creating this was about a week, where I wrote over 6000 lines of C++ which Matt helped refine and restructure. Further changes then took place over several days to produce the final product.
This project was done in CUDA C with a parallel construction. The simulation follows three rules as outlined by Craig Reynolds: separation, cohesion, and alignment as per the description of the boid simulation in Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model by Craig Reynolds in the proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1987. Visualization of the boids was done using OpenGL, with isosceles triangles representing each boid. Triangles were generated using a geometry shader written by my project partner, Matt McMullan. We had mixed results with this, where sometimes the boids would function normally and sometimes would have no data due to an issue with our usage of CUDA that we never tracked down.
Implementation based on Interactive watercolor rendering with temporal coherence and abstraction (Bousseau et. al)
This implementation was created in Unity3D as part of a game called Mar. After working on the cross-hatching rendering technique I was interested in working with other non-photorealistic rendering techniques, specifically watercolor style. I had in mind a game that would look like a geometric, abstract painting, and after proposing the plan to Matt, we began development, with him focusing mainly on the game mechanic implementations while I found several papers on various watercolor rendering techniques and began testing them out.
A piece of paper on a covered tabletop folds itself into an origami crane and flies away. This was done as stop motion using image matting, compositing, and inpainting. A combination of code written using OpenCV and GIMP plugins were used to produce the final result. I produced the OpenCV code and used several existing GIMP plugins. GIMP was mostly used for touch-ups and for fixing and replacing failure cases for my inpainting code (of which there were many) and to help cover failure cases of matting and compositing. This project focused more heavily on the final resulting video than on the success or failure of the techniques I used.
Setup, data collection (shooting footage), coding, editing, and final video creation were performed over the course of 3 weeks as an individual project. I received consultation on my setup and photography from Mary Gordon, who also loaned me equipment (and kindly helped me in setup and tear-down).
This project was inspired by characters such as Toph from Avatar: the Last Airbender and DareDevil from Marvel Comics who "see" the world through sound or other vibrations. This effect is also seen in recent Batman media (DC Comics), specifically the Arkham series of video games and the film The Dark Knight, where a sonar style system gives Batman a visual of the city. These vibrations are often visualized in media as ripples spreading through the environment which outline objects, showing a stylized view to indicate this unique style of "sight."
For this implementation, a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analysis of a sound file was used to generate the ripples, giving a sort of music visualizer. The implementation was made using OpenFrameworks and GLSL. Several test songs were used, including Settle Down by Kimbra which was used for the video below. Due to the computational intensity of both screen recording and producing the output, the video is somewhat choppy.
Animating a character for video games and films is difficult and time consuming, requiring hours of artist labor to produce each animation. These animations are set and inflexible, requiring changes to the animation or sometimes fully new animations to suit new characters or situations for natural looking movements. Jumping is one such animation, where the size, mass, strength, and environment affect the movement of the character. Traditionally these animations are produced by manually posing the character for certain key frames and interpolating between the frames to produce a smooth animation. The more detailed or lengthy an animation, the more work required to specify it. Physics-based simulation for animation production can reduce this work, creating animations for a variety of situations based on constants set for the character and environment. These animations can then be easily recreated or adjusted for different environments by changing the constants set for generation.
This thesis work presents a simulation-based method of control for a character, focusing on the lower body, to produce jumping animations for a variety of situations and body parameters. Two methods of simulation are described, one using a torque calculation and the other using an energy calculation to determine poses for the character. My simulation takes as input a mesh representing the character, a tree of joints describing the skeleton, a set of muscles, mass assigned to each limb of the body, and a description of the desired path through desired timings, gravity, and desired displacement. An inverse kinematic solver is used to aid in posing the character.
Contributions of this thesis include an implementation of a simulation to produce jump animations in \unity{}, a description of character poses based on torque as well as another based on energy, a sampling-based method for choosing a target position, and visualization of the produced animations in several ways to aid in debugging, analysis and presentation.
This project started off severala times as a personal project and was born out of the mess I created when making short webgames. More recently, my goal became putting live examples of my work on this website for easier perusal. I am working to mimic the straightforwardness of OpenFrameworks and Unity scripting so that this can be used for rapid prototyping. There are other WebGL engines and libraries that I could use but part of the reason for this project is for personal satisfaction and learning.
The test page has an error log giving compile and link status of shaders, some debugging information about different objects, a constantly updating feed of the vector bases for the camera (view->world matrix component vectors) and cube model (model->world matrix component vectors for the cube). There's a known issue that I've been trying to pinpoint in which the cube flattens to a hexagon whose plane is orthogonal to the axis of rotation when rotated about certain axes. I've sideboarded the issue as I thought that it was a vector normalization issue or a mistake in my quaternion rotation math, but have yet to create a change in the behavior and have thus moved on temporarily to add more required features so that I may start porting my work and putting it online.
Work on this project is ongoing and I will continue adding features as the need arises.
A game about a lovable stuffed tiger who wishes to become the only one of his kind so he can brag to the other stuffed animals. Developed as a school project in 2 weeks with a group of 5 in pygame. Our team consisted of three programmers and two artists. My main responsibilities were the rudimentary AI for the enemies, the IO and event handling, and the classes used for the projectiles, enemies, and player character, including movement, spawning and interaction. I also collaborated with another of the programmers to handle collisions and implement our custom class for dirty sprite animations, which used the built in drawing functions but replaced pygame's sprite animations. As a result of our optimizations, we had a framerate, as indicated by a counter, of over 1000fps with around 15 moving characters on the screen. We introduced a frame limiter as a result.
The player is able to attack by throwing buttons they collect from the bodies of their vanquished, plush foes. Other attacks include a simple punch and a "ground pound" attack, in which the player character jumps into the air, gracefully executes a flip, and punches into the ground, damaging everything around them. When damaged, they can replenish their health by collecting stuffing, again from the bodies of their vanquished foes.
Samples of work developed using the Panda3D engine. Although I have used the engine and have a moderate degree of familiarity, I wouldn't use it for production, as it is more of a teaching and learning tool. It was important in my skill development however, showing a distinctly more programmatic approach to composing scenes and dealing with game and engine logic than is found in Unity, which has a more graphically based "drag and drop" type of workflow. There is one actual game demonstrated here, while the other examples were part of an individual assignment to produce a simple vehicle (in my case, a penguin with an attached rocket) with a light source that could be moved through the environment to avoid or collide with obstacles (an oversized mushroom and a boulder) in the level.
The individual assignment required each person to produce their own art as well as their own code. I produced the models of the penguin, rocket, mushroom, and boulder, as well as the textures for each, and created a simple environment where a random configuration of mushrooms and boulders were spawned, and the penguin would then be able to navigate. I produced a particle effect for the rocket as well as placed a light for the flames coming from the back.
The group assignment was a game called Alzarian's Artifact, and was based off of the ideas "raise" and "elude" (randomly assigned). The idea is that the player has explored some ruins, and discovered an artifact which allows them to control the stone around them, only to find that there are monsters stalking through the halls. They then elude the monster by raising walls out of the stone beneath their feet, escaping while the monster is stuck, or hiding behind the walls, exploiting the monsters' poor eyesight. The player is able to raise a small wall (a limited number per level) and place small lights to better see the dark rooms while they move to the marked doorways leading to the next level and eventually out. My responsibilities were mainly lighting, as well as a particle effect for lamps, environment modelling,
An unnamed game developed with the Unity3D engine about a robotic dog. It was developed as a class project, and the assigned "theme" for the game was hamartia. Our concept was a robotic dog produced by the military who is loyal and obedient to a fault, progressing through the levels of the game and slowly damaging itself. Eventually, though the dog completes its tasks, it is far too damaged to be useful to the project and the scientists running the project order him disassembled in favor of building a more able prototype.
My responsibilities in this project involved work on customized character and camera controllers, as well as prefab creation, asset imports, level design for one of the levels, asset server management and troubleshooting, general Unity troubleshooting for the whole team, terrain creation, applying collision solids to imported models, animation import and association (with scripts and models) and finally particle effects for a flame effect used by the dog for a flamethrower (used for clearing brush obstacles from the player's path).
Supernova
Project duration: Ongoing
Team size: 2 (potentially going to increase)
A game in the early stages that I'm developing with my friend Rosa Tung. We're currently working in Unity to develop this somewhat abstract game, in which you play in a zero gravity multiplayer environment as a sphere, with the ability to absorb small particles of light. These light particles can be shot at other spheres or used as an attack. Absorb too many light particles and you'll explode, but too few and you implode.
Some of the effects we're working on are a "fat cell" type of look for the spheres, giving them a membranous feel. We also aim to experiment with different control schemes to produce a control scheme which immerses the player and enables them to navigate and attack easily.
Subterrane is an underground horror-exploration game. You play as an athletic caver who has slipped unexpectedly into a deep hole. Your journey to climb out takes you deeper into the earth where you find some of the creatures who live in the caves. This game was developed in Unity3D with a team of 5.
The material applied to the crystals and mushrooms was provided courtesy of Anton Hand.
Particle effects and fog (fog at beginning/end of levels, depth fog)
Mar is an abstract physics game about shepherding the mar balls through their dangerous, puzzling environments, inspired by Lemmings and World of Goo. The mar proceed according to a few simple rules:
Start moving right
If they hit an obstacle or wall, reverse direction
The mar can be altered to help their group along the way. Their material can be changed to be bouncy or sticky, allowing them to fall great distances and bounce or to stick to surfaces to move up and around obstacles. Mar can also be changed into other shapes in addition to the material changes, moving between balls, blocks, and triangular ramps. Each level is structured with an entrance and exit, with platforms and pits that the player must help the mar navigate.
Implementation was carried out by a team of 2 over a period of 7 weeks, with 1 week for initial concepts and design though the design process continued throughout the development of the game.
Space to Fly
Instructions:
Press space to fly upwards
If you aren't flying upwards, you fall
Avoid hitting the green and blue
Pressing P will pause the game
This was an experiment to learn how to use html canvas elements. I'm still using this game and a few other simple tests to experiment with the best way to construct a JavaScript game engine (or at least the best design for me to work with). For working code, I'm moving towards a WebGL drawing component so that I can more easily test shaders and effects, but I've preserved this iteration as an example of one of my quick web prototypes.
