Spirit and Steel
This was the project I worked on at Digipen during Spring ‘25. I was a technical artist on the team, and I primarily focused on procedural environments and shaders. I also worked on some 3D modeling and creating blueprints for interactables.
Procedural Stylized Rocks
I worked on creating two tools for making rock terrains for the beach regions (layered rocks with grassy tops) and the volcano regions (basalt rocks). I made the generators in Houdini where they take in a proxy mesh and create a rock from the shape. I then imported the tool as a Houdini Digital Asset into UE5 for other level artists to use.
Base Fluid Shader
I worked on a base fluid material that could be reused to make the different water materials needed in the game - water, lava, oil, and polluted water. I also worked on optimizing these shaders. The shader also uses the normals of the water plane to either apply a waterfall effect or flat water effect.
Tools to Aid the Asset Pipeline
I made a Houdini tool that quickly auto UV unwraps assets and a smart material that could be reused to apply a watercolor effect to all assets. This was reused by all other artists on the team.
Labor Day Game Jams
Every Labor Day weekend, my husband and I host an annual game jam at our home, with friends joining both in person and online via Discord. Over three days, we collaborate to create a new game.
In 2023, we developed Bound Sea, a side-scrolling platformer where players guide a beach ball across seaside props to reach the ocean. My work focused on tech art: I created a watercolor-style post-process shader, a dynamic water shader, a sandcastle destruction simulation (exported from Houdini to Unreal Engine as a Vertex Animation Texture), and rigs for the beach ball and beach umbrella.
In 2024, we built The Halls of Tindalos, a puzzle-horror game set in a Lovecraftian mansion that spans three time periods. For this project, I wore multiple hats but concentrated on tech art. I implemented breakable props like the chandelier using UE5’s Chaos physics system and blueprints, set up logic for prop states across different eras, and built a master material pipeline to generate three stages of aging for assets. I also designed the jigsaw mini-game and contributed to various gameplay systems.
Pirates of Candyland
This was a team project I worked on at DigiPen. The goal of this project was to complete a video game pitch in one semester in a team of 4. I was the lead environment artist and the lead technical artist for this project. The environment assets were modeled in Maya and Houdini and the final scene was assembled in Unreal Engine 5. In addition to the environment, I developed several tools in Houdini to help with the project.
