First Contact Entertainment

Senior Technical Artist

At First Contact Entertainment, I contributed to the launch of Solaris: Offworld Combat (PC/Quest VR). My responsibilities included optimizing the VR character blueprint, improving overall performance, and developing performant materials and visual effects that matched the project’s style.

Art

  • Designed and implemented dynamic visual assets for the ‘Capture’ game mode, creating animated zones that reflected team ownership, capture progress, and player presence in real time.
  • Developed efficient particle systems for core gameplay effects, including muzzle flashes, explosions, tracers, and other dynamic visuals.
  • Modeled and animated most dynamic world-space UI elements.
  • Developed a complex, animated “death sequence” using a single material effect

Engineering

  • Optimized 1st and 3rd person VR character Animation Blueprint. Migrated all processing from Blueprints to C++. Improved blending between animations and tracked head and hand locations. Added dynamic bone and pose adjustments throughout the body based on hand tracker locations.
  •  Substantially optimized the in-game “Visor” HUD. Replaced all assets using resource-intensive world-space widgets with highly efficient meshes. Dramatically reduced overdraw and the need for frequent widget redraws. Increased frames above 60 FPS from 78% to 99.8%!
  • Integrated dynamic weapon meshes and reticles to gameplay code in C++.

Other

  • Setup and animated Title Screen

Solaris - Title Screen

Particle systems, shaders, and title graphic animations.

Solaris - Intro Zone

Modeling, optimization (instancing), lighting and animation.

Solaris - Intro Zone

Modeling, optimization (instancing), lighting and animation.

Solaris - Capture Zone

Dynamic assets for the ‘Capture’ game mode, creating animated zones that reflected team ownership, capture progress, and player presence in real time.

Solaris - Visor HUD and screen effects

Recording from Meta Quest animated Visor HUD with impact and damage effects.

Solaris - Visor HUD

1st-person “Visor” HUD that dynamically updated with real-time game data, integrating key gameplay elements such as round time, team scores, active items, kill feed, and more.

Solaris - Death Effect

Shader-driven material animation seamlessly synchronized with the character's death state teleportation and an animated skeletal mesh UI element.

Solaris - VR Rigging

Per-bone dynamic pose blending and real-time adjustments driven by VR tracker locations for a more natural player character.

Solaris - Title Screen

Particle systems, lighting, animation.

Solaris - Boot Up

Visor boot-up sequence. Created all meshes, material effects, and animations.

Solaris - Gameplay

Gameplay showcase highlighting visual effects and HUD elements in action. Developed all weapon effects, including tracers, explosions, and muzzle flashes. Designed a dynamic, highly optimized HUD featuring a real-time kill feed and notifications. Implemented animated health bar materials driven by C++ code. Built capture zone world indicators with status notifications to enhance player awareness.

Solaris - Grenade VFX

Grenade mesh and particle system.

Solaris - Ejected

Visor HUD animated sequence during respawning.

Solaris - Capture Zone (...)

Dynamic assets for the ‘Capture’ game mode, creating animated zones that reflected team ownership, capture progress, and player presence in real time.

Solaris - Teleporters Effects

Particle systems and animated shaders.

Solaris - Dash Effect

Dash world-space effect.

Solaris - Hit Indicator Material

Developed a dynamic, procedural hit material adaptable to oval shapes, featuring customizable controls for angle, size, and width. Added support for overlaying graphics and distortion effects to enhance visual feedback.

Solaris - Weapon HUD

Designed a dynamic 3D weapon notification system that displayed critical information such as ammo count, overheat warnings, and reload time

Solaris - Death Material Graph

Material graph for the death/re-spawn material effect.

Solaris - Grenade Launcher HUD

Dynamic 3D HUD that displayed info like ammo count, range, and other information hooked up through code.