Okami, the Slumbering Blade, has served as the main part of my thesis as a senior. Starting out as a flat, 2D concept that I designed in my free time, it has since been brought through the entire game design pipeline. It has required knowledge in typology optimization, rigging, PBR texture workflows, lighting/rendering, and visual effects.
One of the biggest challenges I faced working on Okami, the Slumbering Blade, was its massive blade size. Many props are designed with custom textures, but a 1:1 texture sheet is simply not enough for a blade of Okami's size; texel density restrictions on a 1:1 sheet would never allow it to have a clean Damascus Steel material. Thus, I set out figuring out how to texture the blade without losing any of its fidelity. I decided to deep-dive into Substance Designer and created a Damascus Steel PBR that has parameters which can be adjusted for the style/patterning of Damascus that Okami (and any other weapon) can use. This would allow me to control the look of the blade's base texture without having to jump back and forth between Substance Designer and Unreal Engine 5. I also plan to use this in later updates to Okami, which may require patterns that differentiate from the one Okami currently uses. This also means that This material is utilized by one texture set of Okami, which is reserved for the blade only. The other texture set, which contains the blade's normals and ambient occlusion, also contains the curated textures for the hilt, the handle and the end of the sword. The custom normals and ambient occlusion of the blade are then overlayed on top of the Damascus Steel material via linear interpolation, which allows Okami to make use of both the Damascus Steel tiling texture and normal+AO details.
As the first part of my Fire VFX Trilogy, I created a dynamic shader that resembles fire. It is optimized for VR/AR applications.
The second part of my Fire VFX Trilogy, which is a gradual "dissolving" or "fading in" texture. It is meant to reveal the Fire VFX, but it can also be used in reverse.
The final part of my Fire VFX Trilogy is a dissolving fire VFX which utilizes both a Material Instance and a Niagara Particle System. It it is designed to be used at the end of the fire VFX to give the impression that the fire is dissipating.
On my own time, in the summer of 2023, I wanted to give myself a challenge to recreate a real life object's textures as close as I possibly could. Over the course of two nights, I modeled, textured and rendered this Kabar, which is designed to resemble a real-life World War 2 Kabar currently featured at the Georgia Historical Society.
