Link: shadowood.co.uk --- Resume AlexLovett.pdf
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Contact: alex@shadowood.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0)7761 740 257
Hi my name is Alex Lovett, I am available to work or consult on short to long term projects. My flexibility and wide skill set allows me to jump into complex ongoing projects to fill urgent roles, fix critical problems or add an extra layer of polish in the final hour, as well as taking on entire projects from start to finish.
My recent focus has been crafting Virtual Reality VR and Augmented AR experiences / environments / journeys to immerse and entertain across a multitude of desktop and mobile devices / platforms.
Some of my adventures have combined procedural math based motion graphics with massive particle simulations and visual FX which have been especially compelling when mixed with the kind of immersion VR brings.
I have worked for Unity crafting tech demos from concept to finish, programming tools and interactivity to showcase new technical features for dynamic global illumination ( Enlighten )
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I work as both a creative visual designer and a pragmatic analytical programmer, this allows me to see the whole picture and to coordinate with people of varied disciplines.
I bring creative problem solving with a keen eye and attention to detail to any project. I think in terms of the end product and what needs to be wrestled with to hit milestones both in terms of performance ( especially crucial in AR/VR ) and hitting a high visual quality. This often means taking on a multitude of roles to get the job done, from programming code / shaders, modelling, texturing and animation to developing custom tools and workflows.
I enjoy throwing myself into the unknown and learning new tools and concepts to get the job done, as being well versed in a program as deep and broad as Unity is a challenge requiring constant development to stay ahead.
If you need any assistance I am available for hire and consultation, so feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to see how I can help out, thanks
Alex
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OceanX - Unusual Technologies - iOS realtime interactive demo
"I appreciate how much you did in such a short time!" - Douglas Kelly
"This is looking super cool. Especially considering the quick turn around! Nice job" - Matt West
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Lead programmer and technical artist for producing a digital twin of the marine world, utilising advanced data visualisation techniques to provide an experience that enables scientists and researchers to explore data in an engaging and innovative way.
Parsing of GPS/Remote vehicle sensor data/Topological (Bathymetry) data
User interface and interactive elements for controlling playback, camera.
VFX, shaders for terrain, underwater fog/volumetrics.
“Thanks so much for your amazing work. Always a pleasure!” - Douglas
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Blade & Sorcery - WarpFrog - Unity Lead Shader Programmer
Link: store.steampowered.com --- Blade and Sorcery
I helped design and craft numerous shaders, VFX and editor tooling for artists for the game.
PC VR: River water depth color LUT (rainbow for test of LUT):
PC VR: River water depth color LUT (pond green):
Quest 2 VR: Custom river, fluid flow/foam, caustics, underwater fog without post process, fake transparency for Quest 2:
Fluid sim for river water flow test follows gravity and shape of mesh:
PC: VR: Custom deterministic ocean shader with mobile optimized shore/waves/foam:
Quest 2 VR: Custom ocean, caustics, underwater fog, fake transparency for Quest 2:
Custom PBR shader for skin and hair/anisotropic spec/skin sss, moss, detail maps, specular occlusion and directional specular:
Custom glass shader with fake cubemap refraction for mobile with frosted blurred/grabpass refraction and back lighting:
Rotatable cubemap box shaped reflections for tilting/rotating fake reflections:
Portal system for fake interiors thru doors for performance / LOD:
Fake interior / cubemap interiors for windows (parallax corrected cubemaps):
Rain/Snow occlusion system for per vertex wetness/snow coverage shield by cover/interior spaces:
Custom foliage shader, backlit, alpha to coverage for smooth aliasing, vertex wind animation.
Custom 'post processing' in shader for mobile optimised tone mapping and color correction on Quest 2.
Custom Alembic to vertex animation texture (VAT) system for in shader destruction FX.
Custom clothing occlusion system to handle overlapping clothing combinations masking each other and hiding parts of skin mesh.
Terrain/Mesh multiple texture/vertex painted system using 'Splat' texture arrays with heightmap blending.
Custom light probe volume system for rotatable procedural dungeon lighting.
Custom shader processing for deploying different features variants/keywords per platform desktop/mobile.
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Mars Project
WebGL: Mars project, custom terrain/shader, very very large semi procedural terrain for good detail from far away and close up with differing paintable 'biomes'
WebGL: Custom terrain shader for optimised texture array blending via height
WebGL: Custom terrain, resource heatmap scan effect, ant-aliased grid lines in shader
WebGL: Construction shader effect
WebGL: Pixelated loading post effect/shader masked to new unseen areas by camera frustum
WebGL: Camera shutter post effect / shader
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PC VR: Fake billboard reflections ( reflections in the cube and sphere are generated in the shader cheaply )
Quest 2 VR: Rotatable cube projection reflections
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Digital Kitchen - Lead Unity Tech Artist
I was brought in to work on a Unity 3D powered realtime rendering project for DK
“The presentation of the work was amazing - we definitely surprised a lot of people with how far we could push the boundaries of the technology. Our client is ecstatic about the potential of the platform. It's always great to see a client's face light up with excitement when you load something on the screen. The Unity platform was something we had to prove could work - and with your help, we knocked some socks off.” - Anthony Vitagliano of DK
My job was taking the detailed assets from the team at DK and producing custom materials, shaders and effects that within the limitations of realtime 3D with Unity to visually match provided cinematic quality animated 3D mockups. I handled the cinematic look, lighting, post production, custom code and shader programming (water caustics, procedural coloring and patterns, refractive and dispersive translucent frosted glass like effects in realtime ) to turn it into a living breathing piece.
iOS: Configurable jelly fish with various colour/styles and optimised grab pass for refraction/blurred effect, and caustic
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Vision3 VR - Drop In The Ocean - Convservation International - PC VR
Quest 2 VR: Compute based blur URP:
Quest 2 VR: Simpler blur suitable for Quest VR mobile, using custom scriptable render pass for single pass instancing support:
Quest 2 VR: Caustic particles and caustic surface effects in Shader for mobile Quest VR:
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Solarflare - Asics - Unity VFX Lead - Quest 2 VR
UI and Control for spinning while showing floating details without obscuring product
Distance field for stadium floor/wall effects:
Foot impact effect:
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Unit9 - Bafta - EE - Project - PC
“Thanks again for the hard work and went the extra mile with all the mad creative requests. The closeup detailing looks amazing when we finally saw them on the big screens!” - Rose Hung
Bafta - EE - VFX / Custom anisotropic satin and crystal material:
Crystal effect:
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Shadowrunner - VR
Procedural highway system, delaunay triangulation for branching road intersections.
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Ubisoft - Raving Rabids VR Ride
I was brought in to work on a Virtual Reality / Oculus project moving it from Unity 4 to 5 and taking the lighting, post fx and colour grading to the next level. This fantastic project involved a D-BOX motion chair that moved in combination with the experience you see in virtual reality using the Oculus, this produced a significant benefit both in immersion and making it an exciting yet comfortable nausea free experience even while being thrown at great speed down dangerous ice slopes and across ravines.
Various technical challenges were faced in keeping a steady frame rate in VR while maintaining high quality visuals and effects.This is crucial as any slight drop in performance is magnified in VR producing jarring pauses as you turn your head, highlighting the need for careful planning and performance profiling throughout a VR project.
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Interior Mapping / Parallax Corrected Cubemap for fake window interiors:
Large scale city:
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Unit 9 - Dubai Emaar Project
iPad Pro AR app, custom automated baking setup with GPU baker/bakery for night and day transition, custom shaders for water, waves/shore foam. Custom code and shader for soft animated masks using distance fields.
“Special thanks to our Unity dev Alex, who gave his extra touch to take the visuals to another level” - Yi Nong Dong
“Congrats to the whole team - wonderful to have such a happy client, thanks for your tireless efforts and take a moment to bask in your glory! ” - Rosh Singh
iOS: Multiple masks from one texture (bitmask) affecting revealing of grass/building textures and animating height of buildings in vertex shader:
iOS: Shoreline / distance field waves:
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Unit9 - Rolls Royce
Animated time of day from multiple baked lightmaps using automated baking setup in Unity:
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Hyper - Automotive - Unreal Lighting Lead - Quest 2 VR
Custom workflow for baking multiple times of day, multiple environment changes for Unity and Unreal. Custom dual coat flaked metallic car paint for Unity + Unreal for use on Quest VR. Avoiding performance penalty of HDR and post processing/tone mapping on Quest but achieving the same exact quality.
"This is fantastic!! THANK YOU" - Yates Buckley
"It can even be used as a PHD thesis
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amazing job Alex" - Alberto Venditti
amazing job Alex" - Alberto VendittiTime of day baking, custom car shader, all in Quest 2 VR:
Unity custom car paint (clear coat/dual spec metallic flake) test:
Draft of renderTexture lightmap blending with door open/closed ( door well and interior not being blended so are corrupt still here):
Custom car paint color change test:
Time of day test:
Custom dual layer clear coat car paint shader:
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Unit9 - Virgin Galactic - Unity Lighting Lead - PC
Handling importing of CAD data into Unity thru scripting automation for Rhino, Cinema 4D and Unity.
Handle automated baking of light maps and probes and faded transition between multiple times of day using custom shaders allowing them to blend smoothly from one to another.
“The design director of Virgin Galactic loved it. Great work Alex!” - Mariano Cigliano
“Great, thank you for everything by the way - Great job, the team was really happy with everything” - Jack Berreby
“I also wanted to congratulate for the very great work on VG, well done” - Valerio Rossi
Unity VR time of day changing:
Unreal VR time of day changing:
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Marshmallow Laser Feast - Unity Lighting Artist
Realtime lighting setup and consultancy for VR
“Thanks for your work on the project - some great results!” - Martin Jowers
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Felix & Paul - Future Visual - Unity VR Lead
VR realtime 3D animated demo of animated voxelized animals in a psychedelic color changing dream sequence. Tool building to automate and convert meshes into optimized and animated voxels ( like Minecraft ) keeping performance high while matching closely the original concept art and offline cg renders. Custom shaders and post FX for color changing in VR as you move your head, system for randomizing and controlling spatial sounds timed with interactivity and imported animations. Custom loading system to split gigs of mesh data into shorter sequences to avoid crashing.
"Looks great well done !” - Tim Fleming
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Marxent - Unity VR Expert
Consultant on various architectural visualization projects, brought in to bring visual quality up a notch and teach others, tackling dynamic scenes with changing layout and furnishings with realistic lighting and materials for both VR and mobile iOS
“The team loves it ... These look amazing ... this is why we're calling in the big guns (you)!” - Shawn Rothery
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Bossa Studios - Unity Tech Artist
I consulted on possible technologies and lighting solutions for an upcoming game, along with wrangling an unannounced VR title's lighting and post FX to match concept material. Writing custom shaders to allow artists to apply darkening/fog in shaded tree areas that could facilitate a destructible environment and apply color correction in specified regions defined by 3D volumes with adjustable falloff and wrangling of volumetric effects to add atmosphere with artist placeable/paintable ground fog and volumetric sky/clouds.
“Thanks for all the work that you did, lots of cool visual effects” - Leo Brennan - Producer at Bossa
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Nucco Brain - Google - Unity Lighting Lead
Lighting and performance work on scenes for realtime VR
“Looking very good man! Thank you, You really helped us a lot and I'm most grateful” - Adam Blumenthal
“Let me take the opportunity to reiterate once more how much the whole team appreciated your work and your professionality.” - Mariano Cigliano
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Tin Drum - Lead Lighting & VFX Artist
Worked as part of a small team on a Magic Leap Augmented Reality experience: Marina Abramović: The Life, Serpentine Gallery: 'a slow, minimal, intimate encounter with a virtual Abramovic'.
I developed tools for playback of per frame textures, meshes and pre calculated particle simulation data for mobile Hololens and Magic Leap deployment while maintaining high FPS and high particle count.
Custom shaders for procedural VFX dissolve transitions using distance to plane masks.
Custom workflow for texture processing import/export for on GPU composition dilation/padding and masking/blending of textures and lighting based on world position, chroma keying and distance to sphere masks.
I hacked together a GPU system so that particles can bounce / collide with real surfaces in your room as you would expect. This is none trivial to do in GPU and requires use of volumetric distance fields to perform fast with 10's of thousands of particles on a mobile AR device.
“Today was truly an amazing day. All your hard work paid off. Wonderful comments from the press and VIPs. We delivered. Well done you all… Congrats again team!” - Cris Aragon
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Some more shots from the work done for Unity's realtime lighting demonstration.
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Solid Anim - Unity Lighting Expert - PC
This Project was for Solid Anim in collaboration with Vicon, Popcorn FX and Art Graphique Patrimoine.
I was responsible for Lighting and Materials for an existing model based on scanned data in Unity 5.
3D Scan, lit in Unity:
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THE VOID VR - Unity VR Lighting Artist - PC VR
Custom editor light baking tools for working across multiple scenes, working with lights, and general lighting work to match the look and feel of concept images
“Your lighting is looking nice! bringing the world to life!” - Alan Curtis
Lighting in Unity ( mesh not mine ):
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Arch Virtual VR - Lead Lighting Artist
Realtime scene for Oculus VR in Unity 5 - Model / Scene / Textures were all provided, my job was to take existing assets and make any alterations needed to add photo real touches using latest rendering technologies with greatly improved lighting and post processing effects
“It turned out even better than I hoped it would. I really appreciate it! and everyone I show it to is blown away” - Jon Brouchoud
Link: archvirtual.com --- virtual realism with unity 5
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RAB Lighting - Lead Lighting Artist
Creation of a realtime 3D VR ( Virtual Reality with Oculus Rift ) fly through of several buildings showing realistic lighting and materials.
I authored the entire experience from programming tools for import of CAD data, programming animation tool to smoothly tween between user placed locations to facilitate quick and easy editing and removal of animation clips, cleaning up and remodelling building structures, writing custom shaders for animated water / caustics, handling smooth crossfade transitions without frame drop in VR and altering time of day with realtime bounced lighting ( global illumination )
“It's a hit! Selling out packed audiences every 10 minutes, 500ppl per day! Great job Alex!! The exhibit was the talk of the show. Your hard work was appreciated by so many!!” - Ross Barna CEO
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A Brave Plan - Lighting and Shader Artist
Dramatic lighting and shader overhaul of existing project. Post FX and Color correction to achieve hand drawn minimalist art style, custom depth aware shader for water caustics.
"The meeting… their jaws… amazing… good job on all that” - Georg Backer
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A Brave Plan - The Setup - Lighting / Tech Artist
Baked multiple times of day mixed with realtime lighting on large moveable props ( not using enlighten )
"Holy Shit" - Georg Backer
"Looks soooo gooood!" - Sonja
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Impulsonic - Lead Unity VR Tech Artist
Initial exploration into design concepts for demoing advanced sound propagation technology.
Procedural custom designed interior:
Environment design:
Environment and robot design, rendered in Unity:
