Ph: 619.916.6218 - Email: itsnickcovington@gmail.com - Linkedin
This page overviews much of my work and skills as a Technical Artist, mainly highlighting my primary experience within the field. In this section, you can find some examples of my work building tools, rigging, writing shaders, and using particle systems to build effects.

Code samples: Maxscript Sample - C# Sample - HLSL Sample
Tools
Here's some featured tools i've built in the past that have greatly impacted the pipelines they were associated with.

Waypoint Manager Tool

The waypoint management tool was built to simplify the processes and tasks which desingers were performing within 3ds max. Designers used the line tool to draw paths in the top viewport. The Utility would then properly drop that line to the terrain being navigated over, and populate the curve with waypoint markers which were exported to our engine.

A Video demonstration of this tool can be found here: http://youtu.be/tRYZQFWjtos

Batch Script Runner

Batch script runner is a tool that allows artists to run scripts batch-style on a large list of max files. The tool allowed these lists to be saved out as text files, which allowed other artist performing similar batch script functions to easily populate thier file list. It also had a simple drop down menu for commonly used scripts for the less-techsavvy to use to perform actions.

Material Inspector Utility

One of the biggest headaches when it comes to 3d development is memory management. And when having to sift through hundreds of materials within a scene file to tweak resolution settings, things can get pretty annoing really fast. This tool simplified the management of texture output resolution by allowing artists to simply click on an object in a scene and quickly inspect all materials the object was using, as opposed to having to eyedrop individual objects and sort through (in this case, dozens) of submaterials.

The tool supported listing materials for multiple objects, filtered subobject materials to only display used materials, and featured batch functions to universally effect override settings for the entire or parts of scenes

Conversion Utilities

Guitar Hero had a problem. Artists were manually converting all materials within 3dsmax scenes to prev-gen versions manually. This involved each artist meticulously eyedropping and inspecting each object within a scene to ensure that all materials were converted before the scene was exported to the engine.

I wrote a tool that automated the entire process. The tool inspected the directx settings of next-gen materials and, using logic based on the dx material design, correctly built and assigned new materials for all objects within the scene. This tool cut a multi-day process into a few button clicks.

Quadraped/Biped Autorigger
At Budcat, animators for the longest time were building thier own rigs for each character they were animating individually. This had to change.

I wrote an autorigging tool that cut down the days-long process of building custom rigs for each character down to a few minutes. (and even seconds, in some cases). The Autorigger allowed animators to simply build skeletons that matched the anatomy of the characters that they were rigging, and the tool would handle the rest. Some features of the tool included IK/FK switching, Complex foot roll, And a free floating deformable spine. The system handled both Quadrapedal and Bipedal characters.

Rig setup and features
Animations Using the rig
HLSL Shaders
Here's some of the shaders i've written over the past few months.

Animating Lava Shader

The animating lava shader was a custom shader written, well, for fun. The shader has a animating magma layer and a modulating 'igneous rock' layer.

Features:

  • Combines multiple Diffuse, Specular, Normal Maps.
  • Vertex paint-controlled magma density
  • A simple spinner controll for melting in and out the igneous rock layer.
  • Animated distortion and panning, averaged normal maps.
Download this shader - Shader features vid - Magma distortion/animation Video - 3dsmax 2010 demo scene rar

Basic Blinn/Phong shader

This shader was written as the base for future personal shader development. It features core functionality that is universal to most shaders.

Features:

  • Diffuse, Specular lighting and maps
  • Tangent-space normal mapping
  • Support for both point and directional lights
  • Simple ambient light and rim lighting.
Download this shader

Ramp Shader

This shader is a simple derivative of the basic Blinn/Phong shader which uses the diffuse brightness to lookup a 1D reference texture to determine illumination.

Features:

  • Combines Diffuse, Specular, Normal Maps.
  • 1D ramp texture color lookup.
  • Ramp texture smoothing for low-resolution ramp textures.
  • Both back-lit and top-lit rimlighitng.
Download this shader - Ramp sample textures
Particle Effect Samples
I've spent some time maintaining my love for building and populating scenes with particle effects. It's also a great way for me to be hands on in UDK in a semi-technical fassion. All textures, models, effects and such were modeled in 3dsmax, painted in photoshop, and constructed in UDK.

Video!