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.