0:02 - 0:08
I rigged the bow and character during Abraham Leal's Rigging for Games course. After I finished the rig I collaborated with my CGMA animation instructor Andres Obelmijas on an animation piece. He created the amazing background using Maya geometry and animated the character bringing him to life. My request was for him to do a walk cycle but he went beyond and said he had a lot of fun with it. We communicated through Discord throughout the process to coordinate fixing any issues with the rigs.

0:14 - 0:51
I took a Sun Wukong model by Truong (https://www.artstation.com/truongcgartist) and selected the character based on having interesting clothing and hair to experiment with physics simulations. I followed tutorials on how to use a skeleton for Unreal Engine to rig the character. Using proxy geometry, I worked with guidance from rigger Rijah Kazuo and incorporated feedback from a team of riggers and animators on Discord to achieve the most realistic looking animation in clothing movement. I also worked with Jeremy Ernst (https://www.jeremyernst.com/) who had tutorials on importing and rigging from Maya to Unreal. He also provided feedback and guidance on shaping the tail using blueprints to give the character more appeal and keep from clipping when the character moves. More information can be found below on the FX/simulation portion of the character's hair and clothes in my VFX reel breakdown. 

0:53 - 0:56
This is a shark rig I worked on in my CGMA Rigging course. It was my first time using spline rigs and animating along a curve

1:02- 1:12
This is my first project in Unity where I learned the workflow of importing a character from Maya. This is work from student studies and gave me practice with sculpting a model that is suitable for a game engine.

1:15 - 1:20
These are scripts built during Alexander Richter's Maya python course. The first allows you to populate an environment quickly using geo and varying sizes of trees. The second is an autorig set up I created for Maya for a biped written in python.

Models
Soldier model, bow model: artstation.com/abrahamleca
Sun Wukong: artstation.com/truongcgartist
Waitress: artstation.com/zackb/store
Face ICT: vgl.ict.usc.edu/Data/ICTFaceModel/

Video edited in Blender

0:02 - 0:32
I built off of Entagma KineFX 101 Flower tutorial series to incorporate a snow camera rig that I created using Eric Ebling's Master Houdini FX: Create Stunning Visual Effects Rigs. I also studied realistic falling snow references and looked for ways to mimic pile up on a flower. I used FX 021's Houdini Tutorial: Create snow without simulation that demonstrates the effect on a crag and modified channel ramp ray parameters to be applicable to flower petals.
The key takeaways I took from this project is practicing creating HDAs and controls with custom parameters like easily accessible controls for adjusting turbulence and snow swirl particle size. I also learned how to fake snow pile up on the flowers using particles without simulation. Familiarizing myself with adjusting parameters allowed me to procedurally generate different flower types and volume of particle pile up.

0:41
I used lessons learned about OOP and json from Dhruv Govil's Python for Maya Artist Friendly Programming to create my own rubber band library tool based off a demo Youtuber @ArtsOne completed in Maya to speed up the workflow and create dynamic capabilities.

0:54
I worked on a Sun Wukong physics rig and am solely responsible for the Sun Wukong asset importing from Maya (adding textures, fbx format conversion), creating proxy meshes for simulation, rigging, adding an environment from Unreal store, and animation retargeting part in Maya and Unreal. Feedback and guidance was also incorporated from Jeremy Ernst especially for the Unreal portion of the project.

Thank you also to Will Muto for feedback on presentation of this reel.

Final video made with Davinci Resolve