SHIH-TSUI ARIEL KUO
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           While I worked for AWS Gamelift and Amazon Game studios as software engineer, I know eventually I would like to work on the content itself.  Below are the works that can be shared in public. For the tools that is only served for internal use, please see description on my resume.

Shaders in Call of Duty:Black Ops Cold War

High Moon Studios, Activision Blizzard, 2020

Post effects for CRT scenes, including CRT on/off effect, vintage look and statics if camera gets shot. Different iteration that includes chromatic aberration detail is attach after this video too.


Shaders in Unity

Independent Study in Entertainment Technology Center, 2015

-Duration: 1 week for each shader
-Team Scale:  independent project
-Platform/Tool:  wrote in ShaderLab + CG in Unity
-Description: 
These are what I made while learning shader and trying to implement some shader in this PDF Unity presented in SIGGRAPH 2011.
Three shaders are showing here.
1.  A material shader that works as a enemy indicator or item highlighting indicator. 
2.  Camera effect shader.  Tint pixel according depth buffer information.
3. A force field effect shader. Intersection highlight + texture + distortion.

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Enemy Indicator

This material shader is applied on game objects  working as a enemy indicator or item highlighting indicator. It shows the object with outer glow effect or shield effect, which can be seen even when there are obstacles blocking them.
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Demo video
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Depth Effect 

After camera rendered everything, I rendered the screen the second time and used the depth buffer values to decide what color is going to tint where. With proper scripting, it show the feeling like the world is being shifted from far plane to near plane.
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Demo Video
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Force Field 

- Create soft factor base on information stored in depth buffer (in Shader Forge).
- Add texture on it. Change texture offset according to time.
- Add glancing factor on it (dot product of view direction and normal).
- Use "Grab Pass" to create distortion.
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Demo video

Demo Reel

Two minutes summing-up for my works before 2016, you can refer to further detail in the following part of the page!

Fish Bowl An Animation Short

Carnegie Mellon University, 2016

-Duration: 10 weeks
-Team Scale: 5 people
-Platform/Tool: Maya
-Role:  Technical Artist, 3D Artist
-Description: 
Fish Bowl is an animation short made in a CMU IDEATE course - Animation Art and Technology. I was in charge of technical elements in the ink scene (Maya Fluid system + animated vector field)and mirror fraction/ripple to portal (nCloth). 
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The Drop A FPS Rythm Game

Entertainment Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, 2015

-Duration: 15 weeks
-Team Scale: 5 people
-Platform/Tool: Unity, Maya
-Role:  Technical Artist, 3D Artist
-Description: 
Project The Drop is an experimental game combining elements of rhythm games with first person shooters. The game is a duel between two players, each armed with a piece of music, who battle each other over control of the sound system very much like a musical tug-of-war. My worked on all the 3D model, including rigging and animating and scripted animation in Maya and Unity.

>>>Download the standalone build for Windows/Mac
(2 player mode requires Xbox Controller)
The character/weapon designed by our concept artist (grey background), and the final model in game(middle).
Gameplay video for The Drop.

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Customized Shader

Our artist make this nice speaker model in Cinema4D. However, Unity doesn't support this material, so I wrote a customized shader to achieve the art style.
Learn More
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Scripting Animation

Environment Animation built in Maya by scripting in Python.
Wall breaking/floor flipping
Demo video
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Light Baking

Bake Global Illumination lightmap in Unity 4.6 to decrease the number of light source, keep higher frame rate during the game.
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Sci-Fi Level Design

Course Project in Entertainment Technology Center, 2015

-Duration: 5 weeks
-Team Scale:  independent project
-Platform/Tool: Unity, Maya
-Role:  Technical Artist, 3D Artist
-Description: 
This is a course project where we are allowed to get familiar with all the Unity build-in tools by building a Sci-Fi level.
We were given the basic art models for this level, and starts to make improvement for it.  I iterated on this level by changing materials and adding lighting/camera filter/particle system and simple mechanic by scripting in C#.

>>>Download the standalone build for Windows

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Light Baking

Baking Global Illumination lightmap in Unity 5.1 for emissive materials in the environment. Create certain atmosphere in this dark space station.
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Learn More
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Camera Effects

Using image effect on HDR mode camera, including bloom/anti-alias/tone-mapping to make the image look better. Also applying special effect like vortex,blur which are only triggered in specific circumstances.
Learn More
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Particle Systems

Making smoke and spark using particle system in Unity. For the smoke, I use several kinds of particle system including vertical billboard/horizontal billboard/stretch billboard, along with global fog camera effect to achieve the more realistic look.
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Inksmith An Interactive Children's Book

Entertainment Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, 2015

-Duration: 15 weeks
-Team Scale: 5 people
-Platform/Tool: Unity, Maya, Photoshop
-Role:  Technical Artist, Artist
-Description: 
Project Inksmith is working to translate children's storybooks from paper to touch screen. We work with Pixure Book Publishing to investigate the best way to fully utilize the interactive medium. We did rapid prototype for 3 different manuscript in one semester, and implemented 3 different innovative ways to achieve seamless transitions.

The Youtube video is showing one of the tools I wrote for Adobe Illustrator to batch export vector artwork to PNG files with proper size assigned by users. 

This section of website is still under construction.


Simulations in Maya

Entertainment Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, 2015-2016

Fire/Tornado/Ink Simulation using Fluid Dynamic


Hair/Cloth Simulation in Maya


Polygon Modelling in Maya

spare time work

Modeled my friends's dog and 3D printed it

Disney character Bolt
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