Welcome!

To start things out let me point you to a collection of works;

Cellular Automata: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SgLZ3wWpWE

Rendering Scrap Book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxWhtHjwTIQ

Procedural Fire and Trees White Paper: https://github.com/intelzombi/Procedural-Trees-and-Fire-in-a-Virtual-World

Procedural Fire and Trees video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP-xlGUKwzA

Left side of my Brain: http://www.flickr.com/photos/56603367@N03/

Engineer or Artist? You decide.

Graphics, specifically programmed graphics, is a passion of mine. As a software engineer concentrating on graphics and video games I often here the term programmer art. That is a term that is targeted at programmers who attempt to be artists. I find the term annoying but I have to reluctantly agree that often we produce stick art compared to the great compositions of trained artists. Yet much of what drives my passion is not the engineering but the desire to decompose the elements of art into its fundamental definitions. There is an interesting valley that is gazed upon by both programmers and artists with video games. The technical artist or the artistic engineer. I would love to be an artist but sadly I remain and probably always will as a frustrated artist trapped in the body of an engineer. Not to be sad however because as I stated this is my passion and I can hardly complain about the blessings I've been given. I love being a software engineer. I'm lucky enough to be able to work on some things I find truely interesting.

The first Video was a creation I made that highlights some procedural content creation I developed when I was the technical lead for the Intel Smoke Framework. This video uses that engine but I've crafted the scene to just highlight some of the work I focused on. Specifically the procedural generation of Trees and a procedural fire system that spreads through the trees.

The accompanying white paper for this can be found at: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/procedural-trees-and-procedural-fire-in-a-virtual-world/

I work on and create Real-Time Rendering engines. This has led to the development of several rendering harnesses. The following video is a scrapbook of some of the harnesses and rendering paths I've pursued:

My artistic side: This a clip from my final scene I did for a modeling class using Maya. It is a collection of all the objects I created during the semester. The Fire Truck being the main and by far the most time consuming of the models.

I was writing some tests for graphics throughput and one of the tests I ended up reusing some of my procedural content generation that I used for creating trees. I have expounded on that with something I call Sphere Trees.

This has been a very interesting pursuit. I still haven't found anything useful but I've been able to produce some very interesting, dare I say art, with the program I created. Again this is all procedurally generated using grammars and parsers I created. I'm still pondering if I want to make the code available for the parser and grammars for my sphere trees. Feel free to make inquiries. visit some of my other creations on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/56603367@N03/

For a little fun below is a SIRD. The image below the sird is what you should be able to see. relax your eyes and look beyond the image to let your brain process the hidden picture.