I have been a intern with the Las Vegas Sphere for during my sophomore and junior year at UCLA. I have been working on various projects throughout my tenure and had the opportunity to interact with various teams. My main focus has been to work with artists to help optimize their workflows and creating tools to help build the concept art pipeline. My favorite part of this internship is the exposure I get to highly skilled artists whom know their chosen art tools inside and out. They know all of the buttons and levers to be able to create any scene they desire, regardless of the tools. Through learning about their workflow and complaints, I get the enjoyment of building plugins to add extra buttons to their control panels or new tools to add to their suite. This internship has been a amazing opportunity to learn about how to work with artists and allow me to directly apply what I had learn from my classes and projects.
This has been the project I had been working on for the longest. Early on after learning more about the art pipeline and when I was trying to find my place on the team, I had an idea to use infilling techniques to create seamless textures. Within a day I had learned JavaScript and build a plugin for PhotoShop to implement this idea and distributed it to my team and manager as a proof of concept. With great reception I continued for the next four months advance the project both vertically and horizontally, adding more features and improving the quality while also fundamentally improving the algorithm through research.
I had always questioned about the way my major was structured, where I was required to take a lot of abstract math classes where we create proofs. I found that it did make me a better developer it had forced me to restructure my brain to approach problems differently. Surprisingly I had also found a application directly from one of the most abstract classes I was taking "Complex Analysis" (and no it was not quaternions). There was a projection technique that was used to map the complex plane in a way to better understand complex functions. But after some experimentation I found that this method can also be used to create seamless textures for the Sphere. Compared to the previous method, this method was mathematically perfect allowing it to be consistent and realtime after creating a GLSL shader implementation.
This was a project that was proposed to me by another artist on the team, through a through conversation with them I was able to have a good idea of how I could implement such the project. Without the knowledge of that artist who knew their toolset in and out, this project would not have been possible. Through exploring their idea, I was able to create a tool to visualize our drone shows and release a prototype by the end of that day. It's use began immediately after releasing a proof of concept and I learned how to keep up with bug reports and feature requests.
This was a case-study of my usage as a computational artist to help directly with the art pieces by creating 3D Assets Procedurally. The piece was for PI Day and was displayed on the Sphere on March 14th.
During my downtime between projects, I had spent a lot of time implement various art algorithms and translating to work on the Spherical Canvas. Some of these include Slime Mold Simulations, Boid Simulations, SDE Fractals, L-System growths and various other experiments.
Through talking to one of the other artists on the team, they demonstrated a problem they had with the fact that their current 360 solution was unable to produce renders with depth of field. This is a ongoing project where I am still working on a solution to this problem. I had created a solution simulating how ray tracing engines simulate depth of fields by offsetting ray origins. But this was only possible on a open source 3D game engine such as Blender. I am currently still researching and looking into solutions and attempting find creative solutions around the limitations of the current 3d tools.
Currently building a in-house tool to very efficiently create concept art for the Sphere. Allowing ideas to be rapidly communicated between directors, artists and clients. Built at a web tool with various visualization techniques integrated and stable diffusion for fast image creation.