UE5 - Large Open World Tokyo

  • World Building & Design: Concepted and blocked out visually compelling game worlds, bridge-gaining the gap between design intent and final art.

  • Asset Foundations: Authored core world metrics, proxy meshes, white-box materials, and asset libraries to establish studio development standards.

  • Pipeline Integration: Streamlined asset pipelines between Maya and Unreal Engine, managing geometry cleanup, source files, and collision setup.

  • Technical Art & Optimization: Resolved complex artistic and technical bottlenecks across lighting, navmesh, player flow, composition, and performance.

  • Creative Alignment: Balanced gameplay mechanics with artistic vision, successfully navigating and resolving conflicting design goals.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Proactively collaborated across disciplines, reducing leadership overhead through clear communication and constructive feedback.


UE5 - Dark Halls Blockout

UE5 - Asteroid Blockout

  • World Previsualization: Built and prevised an entire planet from cryptic brief to functional world, authoring the visual art style, storyboards, and key gameplay beats.

  • Level Design & Flow: Engineered player flow, pathing, and collision layouts to optimize gameplay pacing and spatial logic.

  • Atmosphere & Lighting: Executed the look and feel of the environment through custom lighting setups that established the mood and guided player direction.

Blender

  • Hard Surface Modeling: Transitioned from Maya to Blender and found my passion for hard surface modeling SCI-FI shapes. 😊 This has been incredibly helpful on projects where my modeling skills can compliment my world building skills.

Maya Castle Blockout

Using Maya, I was able to take a 2d concept and create a space in 3d. I then exported the scene as an OBJ and got it running inside Unity after much trial and error and coffee.

Original Concept (Left) Maya Blockout (Right)

 
 

My blockout started out very large. As I worked through the layout and design, my next goal was to simplify and refine layout to help deliver a more focus experience.

Sketchup Level Design

Below are images showing the design process of a 3d space I was working on for Sony. I used Google Sketchup to help visualize my design process and level scale beat by beat. As much as they loved the test, they determined I did not have enough industry experience at the time.

Maya Open World Map Design

 
 

Design Process

I utilized Maya to blockout a large Battlefield type of open world. After spending a day researching a few locations and deciding on what locale I wanted to try and create, I began collecting reference images and satellite map data.

Once I was happy with the locale, I began design the space in Maya. I over-layed some top down satellite image files in Maya to help me nail down scale. Once scale and placement was refined, I began thinking about designing the objective locations and points of interest.

I continued to think about how the gameplay would unfold, and so I continued to refine the spaces and started implementing more design callouts to the space, such as spawns, interior space callouts, and potential vehicle routes.