Midterm Demo Reel

My Midterm Demo Reel at Ringling College of Art and Design for Junior year.



Some info about it:

The first section is a modular kit, demonstrating my use of modeling and scale to create a kit with pieces that lock within each other. A restaurant has plenty of shiny and expensive-looking surfaces, so it's a display of shaders with incredibly clean surfaces. The cloth and plates are my favorite works: the bands are generated procedurally, so they are incredibly sharp and require no separate texture. To help remove aliasing, the shader calculates falloff and world position distance from the camera to blur the edges. The plates use sphere masks to generate a perfectly clean circle, and the golden reflection is achieved by multiplying a simple 2D texture (in this case, the velvet texture from the chair) with a golden yellow, and using it as a basic 2D reflection. The end result is quite acceptable.

The second section is a model of an airtank demonstrating advanced vertex painting and material work. The bumpy effect of paint peeling off is achieved with tiling mixmaps and normal maps, and is featured on the main body paint and the rubber handle. The shader also performs if commands to reveal a middle layer through the middle value of the mixmap and is adjustable. The brass performs a simple fade to rust, and the dial oxidizes. As for the base materials, the specular on the paint changes color based on your viewing angle much like a real paint would. The brass contains different normals tiling over the UV sheet with very intense lighting effects. The entire model is only 1300 tris, demonstrating 4 different dynamic materials.

The third section is a coniferous forest biome. The rocks perform a Z-up calculation over the surface normal to blend between a soft snow that always sits on top and a rough rocky surface. The snow uses texture maps to sparkle. All of the trees have vertex displacement based off of the leaf card UV sheet for subtle wind effects. The falling snow particles are also lit and use simple 2D reflections to sparkle.