Yang Chen

Resume        willchenyang@gmail.com       415-650-9258 

Mobile app for furniture brand Jingpoluo                                                                                                 2021

• Showcased an exquisite collection of Chinese transitional furniture

• Featured high-quality 3D furniture models

• Enabled model disassembly for insight into intricate structures

• Incorporated augmented reality (AR) for real-world placement and visualization

Visualization of an art museum                                                                                                          2020

• Simulate visitor traffics within the day

• Stress test the design for elevators and escalators,  ensuring smooth movement of people within the museum space

• Utilized the Unity engine and its Data-Oriented Technology Stack (Unity DOTS)

Indie Game, Voxel based Space Fighter                                                                                                          2017

• Created Minecraft style editor in Unity3D to allow user build any shape of Space Fighter using blocks

• Utilized Firebase as the backend to store users' data

• Created a open world allow multi-players to play against each other

University of Florida                                                                                                                       Gainesville, FL

Master of Digital Arts and Sciences.  GPA:3.85/4.00                                                               08/2012 - 05/2014

University of Macau                                                                                                                 Macau SAR, China

Bachelor of Software Engineering.  GPA:3.67/4.00                                                                  09/2008 - 06/2012

Master Thesis, Real-time Hair Simulation and Rendering                                                     01/2013 - 04/2014

• Implemented a real-time hair modeling framework integrating hairstyling, hair simulation and hair rendering

• Added hair modeling to existing iPASS (interactive pixel-accurate shading of surfaces) project to render the open source movie “Elephant's Dream” in real-time

We use the approach of Hair Meshes to create hair strands from the polygon mesh created using modeling software such as 3ds Max or Maya. Then we simulate a certain number of guide strands to guide motion of the full hair. A dense hair model is created by interpolating the position of the remaining strands from the sparse set of guide strands. The final result is rendered by using the model of Kajiya & Kay. Final result: 240 guide strands with more than 10 vertices per strand: 120 frames per second.  Close to 60 frames per second in the iPASS project. Tested with GeForce GTX 660M.

Research Assistant, Virtual Grocery Store project                                                                 05/2013 - 07/2014

• Contributed to Virtual Grocery Store project for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as one of the virtual environments for therapeutic solutions collaborating with VA hospital

• Implemented first person user control to perform a series of tasks inside Virtual Grocery Store on Unity3D

The purpose of the virtual environments is to examine how the Veterans navigate a complex environment such as a grocery store.  Examples of some of the things they may be asked to do include:

• Locating an object or objects within the store.

• Comparing features of objects within the grocery store.  For example, price, nutritional information, or volume/weight.

• In addition to “doing” tasks such as those listed above, the may encounter some “feeling” tasks involving problems encountered by people within environments such as grocery stores.

Senior Project, Particle-based Fluid Simulation                                                                     07/2011 - 06/2012

• Implemented Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method of fluid simulation on CPU and GPU

• Implemented two-scale SPH method to speed up and improve the performance of particle-based fluid simulation

A two-scale method of particle-based fluid simulation has been implemented based on a standard SPH (Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics) simulation to improve the performance and speed of particle-based fluid simulation. Small-scale details like the droplets and splashing can be reproduced in the simulation. Two different resolutions have been used in this project. The low resolution with large size particles simulates the main flow of the fluid. At the same time, a subset of the fluid which can be arbitrarily defined and dynamically changed is simulated with small particles to provide the details of the complex flow behavior. At last, the low and high resolutions are coupled by appropriate boundary conditions. Compared to the single-resolution simulation, the two-scale method can produce similar surface details with more efficiency because of decreasing the particle number.

Course Project, 3D Voronoi Diagram using Jump Flooding Algorithm on GPU                        Autumn 2013

• Extended Jump flooding algorithm, a constant time 2D algorithm on GPU to compute an approximation of the Voronoi diagram, into 3D space

• Visualized 3D Voronoi diagram by utilizing the volume rendering method ray-casting

Jump flooding is a constant time algorithm on GPU to compute an approximation to the Voronoi diagram of a given set of seeds in a 2D grid. This project adapted this algorithm and extended it into 3D space. The visualization of 3D voronoi diagram was achieved by utilizing ray-casting as an efficient volume rendering method.  

The resolution of 3D volume is 128×128×128 pixels. Tested with 8, 15 and 30 Voronoi sites. Running speed is close to 1.7 frames per second.

Course Project, A complete digital world                                                                                         Autumn 2013

• Designed a character and environments for a digital world from sketch

• Modeled the character in Zbrush, rigged and animated it in Maya and finally exported to Unity3D

Final demo video, Demo video.

An online version to try out, Demo (a web plugin for Unity is needed).

More art works

Course Project, UF bus tracking application on iOS                                                                        Spring 2013

• Designed and implemented a bus tracking and reminding application for student at University of Florida

The goal of this project is to design a clearer and more intuitive interface. Then shorten the waiting time for buses and reduce the error for missing or rushing to buses. 

The main interface displays the user's Favorite bus stops. It contains the bus route number and route name. There is a Walking time to the bus stop and a Bus arrival time allow the user to estimate when to start walking to the bus stop. An Alarm can be set in the background. When the walking time and bus arrival time are equal, it will remind the user to move to the bus stop. There is also an option for subscribing one of the coming buses if there are more buses coming.

The user can subscribe the routes and bus stops in the map interface.