Objective

I have a passion for creating compelling games that harness 3D art for immersive storytelling, fun gameplay, and enabling user creativity. I have professional experience with building avatar systems, camera systems, and 3D environments. My strength is my ability to work closely with game designers, artists, and developers on design and implementation issues, as well as to create new systems that enhance the audience’s visual experience and enjoyment. My long term goal is to design gameplay experiences that cohesively leverage 3D art, game design and storytelling.

Shipped Titles

Superstar City ( Facebook, PC, Mac )
Hangout.net ( Web, PC, Mac )
Hangout Hoops ( Facebook, PC, Mac )

Work Experience

Hangout Industries

A virtual world start-up founded in Boston. Development eventually moved to LA.
January 2008 to August 2010 - Los Angeles CA & Boston MA
Title: 3D Technical Artist

Developed the avatar systems and avatar art style for Superstar City along with the creative director.

• Researched and created a spec for avatar tri-count and joint limits based on: Projected min spec, desired number of avatars in a space, and game engine capabilities ( Unity 3D ).
• Modeled and textured the first set of avatars and clothing assets with Maya and Photoshop. Worked with the creative director to tweak the avatar’s perceived age, based on our target demographic and focus tests.
• Created and maintained the male and female rigs in Maya, optimized them for mo-cap animation transfer. Helped direct mo-cap actors during the capture process.
• Prototyped and implemented the avatar customization systems in Unity. Handled all maintenance, extension and optimization for these systems.
• Prototyped and implemented the avatar facial animation system in Unity. Created a system for animating avatar facial features without using joints, and a system for designers to define facial animations and moods in XML.
• Managed two artists along with the creative director. The artists and myself were responsible for creating clothing items, hair styles, make up etc.. for bi-weekly release to the virtual world.

Developed a single-player playable prototype of the Superstar City virtual world. This prototype was used for external demos and rapid prototyping of new game features, optimizations, and extensions to the avatar systems.

• Developed and maintained the standalone prototype and its features in Unity.
• Developed a room system that allowed users to create 3D rooms from an image/photo of a location. Users could walk around in a 3D space as if walking around in the photographed space.
• Developed a Camera System to track the avatars as they moved around and switched rooms.

Created an immersive mini-game environment for the Superstar City virtual world.

• Modeled and textured the environment and props with Maya and Photoshop.
• Setup GI lighting and created lightmaps for the environment in Maya Mental Ray.

Designed and created a 3D real-time cinematic of a fashion runway. It was used to reward players at the end of a fashion mini-game.

• Modeled and textured the environment with Maya and Photoshop.
• Setup GI lighting and created lightmaps for the environment in Maya Mental Ray.
• Created a Camera system that tracks models walking down the runway, and transitions to, or cuts to different camera locations in the environment.

Designed and created a college basketball style stadium for a first person basketball game.

• Modeled and textured the environment and interactive objects with Maya and Photoshop.
• Created lightmaps and reflection maps for the environment using Mental Ray.
• Setup in game lighting and lighting effects in Unity.
• Setup the environment colliders as well as hoop and net physics.

Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University

July to August 2007 - Waltham, MA

Practicum project: An architectural visualization project with the following deliverable; Create a concept for, model, and render 360/walk-through videos of a finished music performance center for the non-profit organization Zumix. The concept was based on an old firehouse that Zumix had purchased. I was part of a seven person team.

• Modeled the basic exterior structure of the building based on the measurements we took.
• Handled setup and optimization of our render process, GI, and passes in Mental Ray.
• Researched and implemented 360 panoramic renders of the finished space in Mental Ray. I used these renders to create interactive 360 VR elements in Flash.
• Implemented the frontend Flash web page, page navigation logic, and embedding code for the interactive elements with Actionscript.

ARB Interactive

A small media production company.
June to August 2003 - Mumbai, India

Intern, 3D modeler and Flash Animator

• Created 3D models for, lit and rendered three pharmaceutical product videos for USV India Ltd.
• Modeled three conference stall designs and rendered walk-through videos for USV India. One design was built at CPHI Prague '03

Education

Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University
Waltham, MA
3D Animation Certificate, Graduated September 2007

Boston University
Boston, MA
BA Computer Science, 2002 - Graduated January 2007

Software Proficiency

Unity 3D : Deep knowledge of scripting API, Physics systems, Optimization, and Art pipeline.
Maya : NURBS & poly modeling, rigging, MEL & Python scripting, expressions, UV mapping & texturing, shaders, lighting & rendering, Mental Ray, HDR workflow.
Photoshop : Texturing, Vector Art, UI Design, Concepting
Visual Studio : C#
Pixologic Zbrush : Sculpting, export and map creation.
Dreamweaver : CSS, basic Javascript, database integration
Flash : Design & AS3
SVN
Proficient on Windows and MacOS.

Tools

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© Vilas Tewari, 2011, All Rights Reserved