Welcome to my Unreal Engine Technical Art page. Below you will find a collection of both professional and personal tech art work that I have done over the last few years.

3D Rotation of UMG elements in  Unreal Engine

I was inspired by the Unrealfest 2022 UMG talk: https://youtu.be/dSTdAToJ7Gg. Specifically about the ability to pan a UMG widget around via the material's ScreenPosition input. I wanted to take it a step further and try to get it working with 3D transforms. After some trial and error, I got it working and created a small demo project to share for others that want to use the functionality as well.

Most of the work is done in the HLSL node within the material. The technique works by getting the vertex's local position, then doing some matrix math to rotate the vertex position around 3D space, and apply some perspective. Then it generates some data into packed UV channels to build perspective corrected UVs.

Download the project here: https://github.com/engelmanna/UMG3DTransform

Hextile material implementation in Unreal Engine

I came across a paper by Morten Mikkelsen that described a technique to break up tiling in texture through the use of hextiles. The technique looked great, and I wanted to see if I could get it implemented in Unreal Engine. As an added challenge, I wanted to try to implement it without the use of custom HLSL nodes within Unreal. Overall I learned a lot from the project, and in the hope of helping others learn about the techinque, I uploaded the project for free to github: https://github.com/engelmanna/HexTileUnrealEngine

Original Paper by Morten Mikkelsen: https://jcgt.org/published/0011/03/05/

3DS Max model exporter

In 2017, as Torch Technologies began to scale up the number of artists and the amount of art required for our THAAD Skills Trainer project, I wrote an automated export script to remove the tedious process of exporting the many model parts needed for a virtual training product. The final python script allows for users to export one or more models per .max file with a touch of a button.

Tech art highlights include:

• Written in python
• Uses custom .fbxpreset files to ensure each artist exports with the same settings
• Built in convention checking to prevent improperly named or placed files

I was the sole developer for this project.

Space Viewer VR 

In 2018 I was tasked with building a small demo to attract users to Torch Technologies' booth at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs CO. The booth organizers asked for a space related demo that would attract expo attendees into our booth. I was given three weeks to deliver the demo from concept to delivery.

The final demo was an orbit viewer of the most popular satellites in orbit. The application took in two line element sets and general satellite info from celestrak and heavens above and displayed it in context around the earth. Users could see all of the satellite orbits, and could select individual satellites to learn more about them. 

Tech art highlights include:

• Written in C++
• Used procedural mesh components to generate orbit paths at runtime with only a single draw call per orbit
• Used .CSV files imported as data tables to drive satellite orbit and information data
• Custom VR controller with support for animated button/joystick inputs, toggle help overlay
• Custom animated earth material.

I was the sole artist and developer for this project.

Tessellating Cable Actor

Early on in development of the THAAD Skills Trainer, there was a need to easily author long windy cables through the training environment. The solution needed to support very long, thin, winding, overlapping cables. In addition, there were many cables in the scene so performance was a concern. The solution was a blueprint that allowed users to author the cable location by editing an in game spline component. The blueprint would generate a single continuous mesh that followed the spline path. The mesh optimized itself to tessellate based on curvature, and automatically spaced out UVs.

Tech Art highlights include:

• Custom generation of a cable mesh using a procedural component
• Abstracting parameters to user friendly fields that could be edited by artists
• Focus on optimization by only adding edge loops when needed to support tight curves the mesh in real time.

I was responsible for bringing this feature from concept to production.

SIMVANA

Since 2019, I have been the lead artist and product owner for SIMVANA, a VR based medical trainer. I lead a small team of artists, designers, and developers in the development of the product which is nearing a closed beta status. 

Tech art highlights include:

• Established art style and pipeline for SIMVANA
  • This included building out template substance painter and designer nodes, materials, and export settings to ensure a uniform look between artists
• Building functionality of a the deformable breathing bag (a mix of blend-shapes and skeletal mesh driven by blueprints)
• Building patient monitor graph materials that are driven by real-time data.
• Monitoring and troubleshooting performance issues throughout the application.

A video summary is linked below, however more details can be found on my Artstation project page for SIMVANA

ASCII Post Process Material Unreal Marketplace Item

A few years ago I was inspired by old school 3D ASCII renderers, so I wanted to try and replicate the look in Unreal Engine. The final result turned out to be a flexible post process material. 

Technical Art highlights include:

• Abstraction of complex material networks to a few parameterized values for easy artist based modification
• Flexibility to support a wide array of visual styles
• Documentation and project organization so other artists could quickly incorporate the material into their projects

You can view more details about the project on my portfolio project page, or visit the Unreal Marketplace page.

I was the sole artist and developer on this project.

Other Tech Art projects

Some of my other portfolio projects contain small bits of tech art focused work. I've linked a few tech art specific examples below.