Trevor Farriss

My FIEA Entrance Portfolio

Hello! I'm Trevor Farriss, a member of Cohort 23 at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. I am an aspiring technical artist, which is a recent development. I spent my entire undergrad (and beyond) trying to be a character artist. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with shader authoring, which lead to rigging and tools development, and now I'm here. Below is a collection of work that got me into the program. Each has their own post if you'd like to take a deeper look. I'm hoping to use this blog as a journal to catalog all the techniques I pick up in the coming year.

My entrance piece for FIEA. This project was an attempt to make a comprehensive real time rig, as well as learn how to integrate python into my workflow in Maya. Rendered in Unreal Engine 5. Everything was made by me.

Punch Primate has a full face rig, IK and FK switches for his arms and legs, face topology that reacts to where he's looking, and support for the areas of fat on his body.

Throughout this project, I started building out my own set of tools that would speed up my workflow. My methodology was whenever I ran into a thing that I didn't want to do, I'd try and make a script for it. This ended up ballooning my time spent on the project by a LOT. Thankfully I had plenty of spare time. This project was made during my final semesters working at IRSC.

Hi res images and more breakdowns are on my ArtStation.

Yi - Unreal Engine NPR Rendering

Without a doubt this is the most satisfied I've been with a piece. This was fan art I did after finishing Nine Sols (which blows Silksong out of the water). My goal was to create a completely unlit render that sold light and shadow, as well as acquaint myself with the post process workflow in unreal engine.

Main shader demo. A vector is received from the main light in the scene, then using dot product and some smooth step nodes and addition, I created fake light and shadow, as well as a transition color. Main color is texture driven, shadow and transition colors are calculated at runtime.

The hat and veil are a mix of post process and unlit shaders. I'm using the stencil buffer to select what meshes do and do not appear behind the veil, then doing a depth test to color things within the veil mesh black while leaving the background grey. In game effect on the left

Hi res images and further breakdowns are on my ArtStation.

Vine Great Sword - CGMA Mentorship

This is the result of a 10 week mentorship provided by Weston Reid through CGMA. This character art course kicked my ass. This was shortly after I graduated from my bachelor's program. I, having just graduated, thought I was ready to start and industry job. I was not. The sheer amount of technical issues that my first shipped model had were staggeringly bad. However, mamma didn't raise a quitter, so I took it on the chin and really pushed to get my topology in order. I learned a lot about edge flow and retopology during this course.

4K maps. The face and flowers are grouped together so they can bot have Sub Surface Scattering.

I modeled everything in ZBrush with ZModeler before retopology.

The hair shader is fully unlit. I followed and modified this tutorial for the effect. You'll notice its in French. This was a bit of a problem, as I don't speak French, but I wanted the effect bad enough to fight through it.

The Original Concept by Tian Kou.

Reflecting on this, this mentorship was mostly a failure. The materials are kinda whack, especially in the tree roots on the sword, and the topology still isn't production level. However, I gained a sense of direction from this project. We were supposed to render in Marmoset Toolbag, but had an option to use that sexy new Unreal Engine 5 if we wanted. I, knowing absolutely nothing about the engine, of course took the chance to render there. Learning the engine was a giant time sink that significantly impacted the time I spent actually doing the art side of this art mentorship. But I was also introduced Material Graph, which was a revelation. Suddenly all of the coding concepts my instructors tired to impart to me made sense now that I could see the math laid out in front of me. This led me experimenting in Material Graph to building my own blueprints, then to learning python, and all of a sudden I'm in a graduate game design program as a technical artist. Not sure if Weston was trying to make tech artists in his course, but he did!

Hi Res on ArtStation.

This was a translation of some concept art by Yuka Soemy. This was around the time I was getting really into shader development in Unreal Engine post mentorship.

3826 tris. I envisioned this particular model as the thing you look at when you select "inspect" from the menu.

4k map for the metal and glass

Vertex animated fire mesh, which is just a weird cone. Procedurally controlled colors based off Fresnel, controllable size and speed. Offset is generated by scrolling textures.

UV based scrolling. Armed with new knowledge, i could for sure take out the texture sample controlling the vertical bars and just do it with some math.

Original Concept by Yuka Soemy

Hi res on ArtStation

1950's Kitchen

This piece was an experiment with Unreal 5's path tracer and Nanite systems. This was done around the release of 5.2. The drive that was housing this project sadly died so I can't confirm. I do remember the wallpaper was colored procedurally using an RGB map I made in Substance Designer.

All the models are the raw high poly assets. Nanite and path tracing really do make an environment that lets you slap whatever you want into the engine. I think the average polycount of the scene is around over a million but I can't be sure. Polycount wasn't really a concern considering I was targeting a still image.