David C. Kern
creative / technical art director - entrepreneur - founder - manager ceo cto cco
Technical Art at Technicolor
In my current position as Technical Director at Technicolor I am responsible for a team of Technical Artists who provide pipeline tools for Maya, MotionBuilder, ZBrush, Unreal, Unity or whatever the need might be. A few tools I contributed to are listed below:
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Tool in Maya to place stitches on shoes or soccer balls for hi-res assets in FIFA 2015.
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Tool to match frames in MotionBuilder for UFC 2015.
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Tool to build hair cards in Maya from splines exported from ZBrush.
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Tool to assist clean up near eyes, nose and mouth in hi-res head scans in Maya
As technical director I also look for pipelines that need improvements both in the games group and TV animation. Typically this involves setting up training programs for software such as Substance, ZBrush or Unreal or specifying system setups for various disciplines.
One interesting project I worked on was in Unity rendering animated characters with a fur shader for a mobile game. The game has not shipped yet so I cannot show any pictures.
Another project was for SOF Studios for the game H-Hour. We built a level in Unreal. The game is in pre-release on Steam, (a screenshot can be found on the Portfolio page). This was the first entire level which was built by Technicolor. Since we are an outsource studio we typically get work piecemeal. I was able to use my level building experience to guide the creation of this level.
For EA FIFA I was helping troubleshoot pipeline issues and communicating issues with the client.
For Call of Duty I review some assets and materials and look in on the scanned blendshape cleanup work for hi-res heads.
Technical Art for SONY/Zipper
This was a Maya tool I wrote which would set up expressions to drive wheels on a vehicle or tank. All wheels would turn the appropriate amount when the vehicle was animated.
A typical problem in rendering real time cinemas is keeping all the appropriate items synced to a frame if the camera cuts to avoid anything lerping into the frame. This tool found camera cuts by calculating the camera acceleration between frames. The frames were marked with an attribute at the cut and the exported data was used by the game code to know when a camera cut was going to occur.
This shows the light and camera setup for a cinema scene. In collaboration with the team I developed the tools for exporting motion data for the characters, lights props and camera. I made the camera rig which allowed us to visualize depth of field with a focus volume and near and far planes.
I developed this eye rig because it was difficult for animators to know what the character was looking at. It included the ability to bring the eyes slightly cross eyed which is what happens when a person looks at something very close like a book.
Our projects had thousands of materials that had to be shared easily between artists. This Maya tool accessed a library and also allowed the assembly of a new material exposing only the parameters we wanted the artists to touch. The tool was used extensively in the studio for MAG, S4 and Unit 13. I was responsible for maintaining and adding features to this tool.
I was a big proponent of World Machine. I assembled this macro to assist artists in making texture masks for our terrain.
Results of the macro in World Machine. The ability to visualize the mask layers before we spent the time to bring them in to our level editor.
This was a demo level I built to show the power of World Machine before the studio adopted it into the pipeline.
This level editor was developed for MAG and S4. I had a great deal of input into its design. Shown here is a model placement editor based on painting alpha masks.Objects could be individual or grouped and painted in clusters with or without randomization.
Demo level showing World Machine used for near and distant terrain plus painted foliage. Foliage in the distance was baked into the color map of the terrain.
The terrain for this level was very large. I worked with Stephen Schmitt the developer of World Machine to suggest improvements to the tiled output in the Pro version which we were then able to import easily into our level editor. I also had to demonstrate to our design and art team how the terrain could continue to be iterated in World Machine after the design layout was complete.
Technical Art and Coding at nobodinos
Bottom Feeders was originally prototyped and written in Flash Actionscript. At the time I had been teaching a class in Actionscript and UI design at Digipen and was surprised at how powerful Actionscript was. The game was first published on Facebook. We took the game to iOS using MOAI, an open source mobile game engine. I used X-Code to debug and add features when necessary but the bulk of the game is coded in lua. The game is an action puzzle game with Box-2D dynamics, it also features a 3D aquarium portion where players can collect characters. I wrote the bulk of the code for this game contributed to game design, UI design and 3D art. Bottom Feeders is available for iOS on the app store at this link: BottomFeeders_AppStore
The level builder ran on a Mac or PC. I originally wrote this in Flash ActionScript but then eventually converted it to MOAI/lua
The level builder saved out a position and attribute for each object type to a file. The level length (screens wide) could be adjusted at anytime and a button press allowed you to play the level right away.