Technical Art

LEGO Tool Scripts for Maya

The LEGO Tool Scripts for Maya is a collection of complementary tools designed to simplify the process of constructing 3D LEGO models for use in games and rendering. Features include custom Material and Part Browsers, which retain a realtime connection to an underlying database.
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Halftone and Hatching Shader

For a course on graphics programming, I set out to create a GLSL shader based on the stylized shading found in printed media. The shadows were blended with diagonal hatching, while the specular highlights were fed through a halftone function. To allow for post-processing, the shader was optimized to use Multiple Render Targets (MRT).
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Lip Syncing Utility

For an advanced course on animation programming, I prototyped a system in Unity for automatically syncing mouth shapes (phonemes) to audio, based on a text transcription. An underlying Python layer was used to convert text to phonetic data, which was then mapped to the audio data to derive phonetic timing data. This data was then visualized on a mouth using blendshapes, controlled by C#.
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Ambient Occlusion Vertex Baker

As a companion to Maya's prelight utility, I created a tool for rapidly baking ambient occlusion to vertex colors. This deceptively simple tool required under-the-hood features such as UV packing, baking to textures, and automated attribute transfers.
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Clothesline Tool (Houdini)

To help quickly populate scenes, I built a Houdini tool for procedurally generating clotheslines based on a simple 2-point input spline. Through the parameter interface, artists were given full control over wire slack, radius, and divisions, pulley radius and divisions, and an under-the-hood clothes simulation.
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Warpage Generator

Surface warpage can be a key to photorealism when digitally rendering a model, but is surprisingly rare in real-time graphics. To solve this issue, I created a custom generator for Substance Painter that allows artists to quickly simulate the physical warping of an object's surface.
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Games

Not Quite Immortal

I acted in dual roles as the environment and technical artist on this supernatural puzzle platformer. My responsibilities included reworking the art style when the game pivoted from 2D to 2.5D, producing all 3D models used in the game, setting up assets in-engine, creating shaders, and building art pipeline tools.
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LEGO Worlds

Ahead of the worldwide release of LEGO Worlds in 2017, I worked with the development team at TT Games to design models for inclusion in the game and use in the marketing campaign. The models I designed were featured prominently at E3 2016, game preview events, and in marketing materials.
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Unity X LEGO Game Jam

For the 2021 Unity x LEGO game jam, I set out to create a short proof-of-concept for a medieval RTS game. Apart from the LEGO brick meshes provided, all assets and code were created from scratch over the course of a month.
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​Other Art

Explorer's Study

Crafted over several weeks for a college course on environment art, the goal of this project was to familiarize myself with bringing an interior game level from blockout to final scene, including modelling, texturing, and lighting. The "Explorer's Study" subject was chosen in order to maximize the possibilities for environmental storytelling, while offering the potential for a diverse set of props and experimentation with atmosphere.
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Minifigure

Around the start of 2017, I worked on modeling, texturing, and surfacing a highly-detailed, ultra-photorealistic version of a LEGO minifigure. The rendering and modeling was done in Cinema 4D, and the surfacing and texturing was done with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Substance Painter.
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Writing

New Elementary

Since 2018, I have been a regular contributor to New Elementary, where I have written extensively about the latest LEGO elements, reviewed sets, interviewed designers, and reported on press events
A full list of my articles follows:
©2022 Benjamin Davies​