About Me Duolatera Runtime Procedural Generation Artwork VR Exercise Research

Environment Tech Art Sample

Assets and effects in San Miguel

This artwork were created for The Forge custom engine demo, as I worked as contract technical artist.

The original San Miguel asset contains two versions with different polygon amount. However, the high poly version is too performance demanding for our mobile target platform, while the low poly version lacks many details to demonstrate the rendering aesthetics.
My job is finding a sweet spot between the poly count and details.

Duration

07/2025 - 10/2025

Skill

Hard surface modeling (topology, normal baking)
PBR material workflow
Particle effects

As the first technical artist in the team, I worked with several graphics programmers and software engineers, to establish and document the asset production workflow, customized to The Forge PBR pipeline.
To meet specific requirements such as texture color space, I leveraged several tools and took some unconventional approaches to get the job done.
At the same time, I’ve been multitasking creating particle effects using our in-house editor.
I communicated clearly with feature requests and maintained a rapid iterative feedback loop on feature updates, with several teammates across multiple time zones.
I’m so happy that my work on the aesthetic has made the demo much more appealing, and appreciated by all my colleagues.


I also contributed my effort in making these particle effects using The Forge Remote Editor particle system.
To keep a smooth feedback loop, I developed a living doc involving everyone across multiple time zones, in this way, as a global team, we could rapidly iterate by day.
Every detail is documented, such as exact steps to reproduce the bug, my thinking on ways of improvement, drawings on UI suggestions, user experience analysis...
Many features that are proposed by me later on are supported in the editor, such as curl noise force field, which also resulted in the global wind factor, there are also UI and edit logic redesign, particle variantion in size, color, opacity, speed, spawn volume, UI gizmo...
Countless bugs, details, and updates were intensively tested by me.

Recorded from Samsung Galaxy S22

Stylized Artwork Collection

Infinity's House

An animated scene, concept from the movie The Legend of Hei.
Modeled, textured, shaded, animated and rendered in Blender on my own.

Duration

09/2024 - 11/2024

Skill

Modeling (scupting and hard surface)
Procedural technical shading and texture painting
animation and video editing.

Model Breakdown

Surroundings: Rock-wood-water environment, constructed in a spiritual space.
Buildings: Ancient Chinese architecture with temple style roof structure.

Arch roof structure referenced from ancient Chinese buildings.


Technical Shading

Foliage

Using Data Transfer - Custom Normals, foliage meshes' normals behaves as smooth clusters thus creating a comic style rendering.
This technique requires many compensatory lights to wipe out or add in shadows (with even negative lights).

During rendering, I found that foliage renders the best without AO, while other scenes requires AO ticked on.

My solution is rendering two times with different AO (and other necessary) settings, and compositing them together.
Using alpha holdout mask, I could render the foliage and other environment separately, and combine two shots in compositing pass.

Procedural Toon Shading

For the natural surrounding, I procedurally generated the grass/moss texture using vertex normal, noise and color gradient.
Then I multiplied the texture with toon shading flattened diffuse color.


Finally, I crafted a procedural shader for the water surface as well.

Hard surface Practice

Fire Hydrant


Vacuum for VR

I created this asset for hand held weapon in VR environment.
First, I created a high poly version, and I baked the normal onto the low poly version.
After assigning the ID, I created the texture in Substance Painter.

simulation

Using Flip Fluid Blender addon, I created this beach scene with wave simulation.
I added a custom vertex shader for the rocks. The wet and dry area dynamically changes and shows different shading under the sunlight.

Other Artwork collection