Meta / Reality Labs (2024)

In 2024, I joined the Reality Labs team as a Technical Artist on Meta Horizon Worlds, to assist the 2P Creative team in communicating and facilitating our contractor’s work through the pipeline to be ingested into the game. I worked specifically on “Emotes” which, contrary to their name, were actually little animated particles that shot out of the player’s hands.

Within 2P Creative’s team, I led the charge on emotes for 10-20 or so ongoing titles inside of Horizon Worlds, each with 5-10 emotes that were produced by our contracting team overseas using PopcornFX. I would then ingest this work through the ever-changing pipeline, creating branding and store assets, writing descriptions and metadata for the asset, and testing in-game. My biggest contribution to this role was setting a new standard for emotes that were tightly-animated, more appealing to look at, and taking more risks with the concepts we picked, with the goal of giving players a cleanly-authored way to express themselves in a world where everything is dynamically generated.

Later, I was apart of the push to prepare new assets for the “Avatar Style 2.0” switch which required almost every single clothing asset to be redesigned and resculpted from scratch. In particular, I helped ingest and rig hundreds of assets, and in particular dogfooded an immense amount of work through a burgeoning automated asset pipeline.

My biggest contribution was my ability to connect teams within our spheres together, and to get people talking to one-another. With a company as big as Meta, it can seem almost impossible to know who’s working on what, but we managed to form an independent coalition of technical artists who helped push for change in small ways, and kept people communicating so that nobody would get bogged down by the same bugs twice. All while the game was live, changing and growing constantly, and while the company itself went through several shifts in the pipeline.

Together Labs / WithMe (2021-2023)

In 2021, I joined the Together Labs team as an animator for WithMe. WithMe was a mobile social game aimed at a younger audience, and I helped develop the game’s animation style. On his first assignment, I created a set of animations for the game’s Dress Up/Customization room, breathing life into an otherwise very static experience, in just under two weeks. The animations quickly set a lighthearted, but grounded style that the rest of the teams grappled onto. Not long after that, we shipped the project and continued to develop it while it was live. I would later go on to produce around 100+ animations for the game, including directing, laying out, and animating some of the game’s cinematics to better showcase player’s avatars inhabiting the world.

I also designed, prototyped, iterated, and shipped an intractable “Photobooth” which gave the animation team an edge in being able to implement new gameplay elements without needing engineering assistance. My technical contributions to the game included batch-revisions on the game’s animations, remapping the skeleton and animation rig in Maya and Unreal to remove/adjust joints, building animation tools, documenting major overhauls in video and written form for stakeholders, and fixing mocap workflows in Maya. During a major project restructuring, I helped insert and remap existing controls onto an entirely new character model into the game, while facilitating a massive team-wide transition to UE5.

Except for the UE5 work, all work was done live while the game was shipping updates at the end of every week.

Sparkour (2014-2017)

Elements (2012-2014)

Elements was a short film project I directed in my early days. Originally pitched as an animated mini-series, it was notable for being the first original film project produced using the free Source Filmmaker tool. I did the bulk of laying out and animating on most shots, as well as writing, editing, lighting, environment and prop modeling. For animation, modeling, and sound work done by others, I was the lead, and provided constant feedback.

The project did not receive the funding required to produce it as a full series, but a 2 minute pitch trailer was produced during the process, and stands as a testament to what the project could’ve been, as well as a demonstration of my animation and technical abilities.