Frank J. Chao

Technical Artist

Innovative and serendipitous professional with 7+ years of uninterrupted experience in most of the work pipelines of videogame production and 3d real time graphics using Unreal Engine. Both one-man-band and committed team player, thrives in solving problems and taking ideas into real life solutions.

Portfolio Showcases

Tools and scripts

VFX

Shaders and materials

Lighting, Level art and design

Characters and Technical Animation

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// Tools and scripts

Waterfall tool

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Snow Vector field baker

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// VFX

Ravens Swarm

Cheap smart interactable GPU Particles System that simulate a swarm of agressive ravens. Done in Unreal Niagara using HLSL shader code modules to drive the behavior.

Stylized Monsters Attack Particles

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// Shaders and Materials

Heavy Rain Post-Process

Complex Unreal Post-Process Material set to quickly and cheaply add adjustable heavy pouring rain to any scene.

Impact frame post-process

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

CRT shader for emulators

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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//Lighting, Level art and Design

Unlit Level Art in A-VOID

Fully unlit level art work in the Unreal Engine powered game A-VOID for mobile Android and Vulkan devices. Prebaked lighting and other shader tricks were used to achieve a stylized but detailed and high contrast detailed art style.

Fractal cave level

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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//Characters and Technical Animation

Non Bipedal Creature Procedural Animation

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Stylized Monsters Animations

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// Tools and Scripts / Waterfall Tool

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// Tools and Scripts / Vector Field Baker

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// VFX / Ravens Swarm

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// VFX / Stylized Monsters Attack Particles

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// Materials and Shaders / Impact Frame

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// Materials and Shaders / Heavy Rain Post-Process

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// Materials and Shaders / CRT shader for emulators

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// Lighting, Level art and design / Fractal cave level

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// Lighting, Level art and design / Unlit Level Art in A-VOID

For the puzzle game A-VOID the art pipeline was designed to be compatible with having the best rendering performance possible so it could run on mobile devices. Since the scale and scope of the level scenes was small it was decided to go fully with the use of purely unlit materials. Several techniques where used to create the textures, mainly prebaked lighting via a twin blender scene, digitally processed images and hand-painted textures. The game has 9 color themed scenes (yes, names were an homage to several sci-fi literature authors, can you get all the refs? ;) ):
► a Hub for accessing all the worlds
► Montag Planet: a canyon in a volcanic planet
► Nautilus Moon: a oceanic rainy moon
► Rama Asteroid: a frozen asteroid
► Atreides Nebula: a yellow gasy nebula
► Dyson Reactor: an alien huge energy structure
► Morlock Blackhole: the orbit of a black hole
► Arroway Hyperspace Run: hyperspace wormhole
► Trantor Dimensions: huge abstract structures

The Hub

The Hub level is a single room that hold the doors to all the actual playable puzzle levles. The room is composed of 4 meshes, namely a walls mesh, a transparent floor mesh, a reflections mesh below it and a doors mesh. The doors get activated as certain number of puzzles get solved in each level. This is done sequentially so lighting in the room changes as the glowing doors get activated. For this several lightmap textures had to be baked and the materials had to be synced with the game advancement to reflect correctly the unlocked levels.

Montag Planet

Montag planet level was made just as simple canyon of black volcanic rock with a lava river flowing below. The scene has a very simple construction that comprises the canyon mesh itself, a lava river mesh, a sky sphere and a couple of smoke particle systems. The main canyon texture was baked also from its twin scene in blender. The Canyon mesh could be made fairly high poly count thanks to the simplcitiy of the scene and the large breathing room the usage of extremely cheap rendering gave us performance-wise. This allowed for making it more interesting visually.

The lava river mesh was made to have a straight UV layout despite its curved topology in 3D space. This allowed for a cheap way of having an interesting flowing pattern.

Nautilus Moon

Rama Asteroid

Atreides Nebula

Dyson Reactor

Morlock Blackhole

Arroway Hyperspace Run

Trantor Dimension

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// Characters and Technical Animation / Non Bipedal Creature Procedural Animation

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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// Characters and Technical Animation / Stylized Monsters Animations

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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