Brian Chung
Contact MeCareer Objective:
World domination.
In the meantime, work on world-class video games by assisting the art department with a smooth work flow so they can produce content faster and better.
Work Experience:
July 2010 -
March 2011
March 2011
Volition/THQ, Technical Artist
Saints Row the Third
- Took over and managed the vehicle art pipeline, as well as maintaining and creating numerous tools to help the vehicle artists:
- Managed the vehicle shader library, updating and creating new ones as needed.
- Managed a LOD weight paint tool and updated it for a new game engine.
- Created a grime painting tool to apply unique, vertex based grime to vehicles.
- Created a helper creation tool to speed up creation of helper components of a vehicle (headlights, exhaust, door handles, etc.).
- Created numerous tools to manage the vehicle materials and allow the artists to batch adjust colours the new material system variants.
- Collaborated with the other tech artists to create a unified asset checker; I also supplied the vehicle related checks.
- Wrote various support tools in Python to be used by the environment artists within the CTG World Editor:
- Created a scene exporter that directly exports a building group from the original asset files to 3D Studio Max for optimization.
- Rewrote the Note object to support multiple email addresses, external emails, and sending an email to a specific person.
- Added dockable selection and display filter panels for easier scene management by the artists.
- Enhanced the display filter to also disable lights (revert to default lighting) in the world to speed up the rendering of large scenes.
- Updated various objects in the world editor to display additional information such as the joint constraints of hinge helpers between objects.
- Developed a global unified help system for the project:
- Intuitive Microsoft OneNote interface allows artists to maintain their collaborative documentation without assistance.
- Added a help panel to the CTG Editor that provides context sensitive help directly from the help system in real time.
- Updated various tools in 3D Studio Max to also link directly to any relevant information in the help system.
- Managed a command reference tool written in Python. It allowed a user to submit commands directly to the consoles without having to remember and type to the command line.
An example of grime painted on the police car.
October 2005 -
February 2010
February 2010
Bioware/EA, Technical Artist
My demo reel when I applied to Bioware in 2005. 40mb AVI.
- Dragon Age: Origins:
- Generated lightmaps by hand for “The Fade” tileset and numerous other assets, as the automatic generation could result in bad shadows.
- Investigated, identified and resolved problems with porting the game to three platforms (PC, Xbox360 and PS3).
- Maintained the art asset pipeline, allowing the artist to direct which packages the content gets exported to.
- Initiated a GUI-based, unified script repository to collect, categorize and distribute all the MaxScripts in the company. Some tool examples:
- A seam remover, or desparkler, which snaps all the vertices of a mesh to the nearest whole centimeter. This helps to remove all the small gaps between.
- Automatic bounding box creation for objects, groups of object, opposing corners and along selected edges.
- Automatic unwrapping for lightmaps, and duplication of existing channels.
- Interface customizes itself based on the artist's role, so they only see tools relevant to the task at hand.
- Model optimizations, such as poly reduction on hidden statue geometry and merging multiple material and texture map usage.
- Created a one button export tool to piggy back off the existing export system and automate a lot of the boilerplate model creation tasks. This allowed artists to rapidly test their assets in-game before applying custom settings.
- Dragon Age: Awakening:
- Created the crystal maul and crystal staff weapons.
- Unannounced project (UE3):
- Investigated multiple methods of streaming for an open world design.
- Investigated various methods for creating the environment to account for streaming.
- For an internal demo, made a cloud material that didn't require any programming assistance for its random lightning flashes.
- Mass Effect 1:
- Helped with the area mini-map generation.
- Worked on the uncharted worlds.
- Generated the collision for the majority of the game and wrote a collision management tool in MaxScript to help speed up creation and testing of it.
- Investigated optimizations for a brand new engine.
- Level streaming (Yes, the slow elevators were partially my fault, but it could have been much worse).
- WyvernCrown of Cormyr (NWN Premium Module DLC):
- Pioneered the horse system and a way to swap animation sets on the fly.
- Art creation of various tilesets and miscellaneous placeables.
- Neverwinter Nights - Patches 1.67 to 1.69 (final):
- Primarily handling the integration of the DLC content from previous Premium Modules into the patch contents.
- Integrated the horse system into the game.
The Fade with fixed lightmaps. Before it had a lot of seams and dark spots due to all the curves from auto lightmap generation. Also, no gaps between the wall pieces from the desparkler.
December 2002 -
October 2005
October 2005
DragonLance Adventures (mod group/contract), 3D Modeler/Animator
- Mod group initially formed to do a total conversion of the DragonLance adventure series for Neverwinter Nights.
- Assisted in the development of NWMax, a collection of tools for importing and exporting art assets to NWN.
- Developed the horse system that eventually got integrated into the core game itself.
- Sample Images: horse33.jpg horse34.jpg nwn_horses.jpg
- Animation Rig
- Sample animations: Gallop, Walk, Taunt/Rearing up
- Frequent collaborator on the forums and greater game community.
- Group was contracted out by BioWare to produce art content for their Premium Module DLC products, and eventually authored a full DLC module (“Wyvern Crown of Cormyr”).
Solace, signature setting of the series.
Seeker House set in Solace.
Horses and some variants.
July 2004 -
August 2005
August 2005
Set Solutions, 3D Modeler
Created 3D models of props and sets from concept images for better visualization prior to construction of the sets for filming commercial spots.
September 1999 -
February 2001
February 2001
Novator Systems Ltd., Network Administrator
Maintained an 80+ node LAN, help-desk duties and administering web servers for development and production for the company's hosted clients.
Computer Skills:
Graphic Software:
- 3D Studio Max, MaxScript
- Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro
- Maya
- Aurora (Neverwinter Nights) (5+ years)
- Unreal Engine 3 (Mass Effect, Unannounced project) (2 years)
- Eclipse (Dragon Age)
- Saints Row 3 Engine
- PHP, Perl
- Python
- NWScript (4 years) / DAScript
- Pawn (SourceMod)
- Familiar with SQL and databases
Fast learner for any computer program or language.
Flexible skill set allowed integration with other disciplines as needed, such as during high workload periods.
Education:
January 2002
3D Digital Animation (Maya certificate)
Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology, Digital Media Center
April 1998
Illustration - Technical (Computer Graphics diploma)
Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology, Communication Arts
