Duration

May - September 2021

Role

Director & lead technical artist on Wave side

Tools

Unity (HDRP)

Highlights

  • Advised and helped design interactivity for show during concept phase with Riot

  • Created cinematic camera system and avatar offset animation system for use by animators from the Mill

  • Established content integration pipeline for team of close to 20 people

  • Fixed many bugs

  • Art polish on camera moves for the final shots to remove any awkward or unflattering camera angles on the avatars

  • Created the interactions involving live Zoom video feed of viewers

  • Advised on Unity specific workflows for rendering, lighting, post-processing, vfx and more

About

From late May to September of 2021, I worked on an amazing collaboration with Riot games, The Mill and Wave creating a live interactive virtual concert experience for Riot’s virtual metal band, Pentakill.

I was the director on the Wave side, where we handled interaction design and implementation, software development, content integration, live broadcast execution, and technical art tasks.

The Mill created all of the content, so we worked heavily with them during production to hook everything together and ensure we were making things in the right way for a live virtual concert.

In the early days of production, myself and some others at Wave sat with members from the Riot music division and we brainstormed ways to turn the epic narrative they had conceived into a format that could be performed as a live and interactive virtual concert akin to what Wave does. We came up with a team based mechanic where 3 teams competed against each other throughout the show to see who could click most during various interactions such as “power up Mordekaiser”, with a leaderboard at the end showing the winner. Because of this live element, this show could be repeated multiple times with different outcomes.

We performed the show in September, live from Digital Domain’s motion capture studio, utilizing their optical tracking based mocap system called Giant for motion capture and head mounted iPhones for face capture.