Brian Gans' Portfolio
About

Technical Artist / Generalist in the San Diego area.

Credits on MobyGames

Projects on GitHub

Education

B.S. with Honors in Game Art & Design from The Art Institute of California, San Diego, 2007

Credits
  • Death Stranding (PS4)
    • Environment Artist
  • Drawn to Death (PS4)
    • Technical Artist
  • The Order: 1886 (PS4)
    • Mocap Support
  • Knack (PS3)
    • Tech Art Support
  • inFAMOUS: Second Son (PS3)
    • Face Scan Artist
  • PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale (PS3)
    • VFX Artist
  • Sorcery (PS3)
    • UI Artist / Programming
  • Twisted Metal (PS3)
    • Cinematic Support
  • ModNation Racers (PS3)
    • Cinematic Support
  • PlayStation Home (PS3)
    • 3D Artist / Programming
  • Merchants of Brooklyn / Drug Wars (PC)
    • Art Director
Employment
  • Sony Interactive Entertainment
    • 3-2018 ~ 5-2020
    • 3D / Tech Artist
  • The Bartlet Jones Supernatural Detective Agency
    • 7-2013 ~ 2-2018
    • Technical Artist
  • Sony Computer Entertainment America
    • 8-2009 ~ 7-2013
    • 3D / Tech Artist
  • Paleo Entertainment
    • 10-2007 ~ 7-2009
    • Art Director
  • PromoVentures, Inc.
    • 4-2006 ~ 10-2007
    • 3D / Photoshop / Flash Artist
Programs
  • 3DS Max
  • Adobe After Effects
  • Adobe Animate (Flash)
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • CryEngine 2
  • Git
  • Maya
  • Perforce
  • Substance Painter
  • Tortoise SVN
  • Unity
  • Unreal Engine 4
Industry Projects



The Last of Us Part II (PS4)
  • Created physicalized interactable environment objects to add life to some levels.
  • Simulated physics hair, cloth, rigid body behaviors in Maya for a baked animation to be used in environment assets.



Death Stranding (PS4)
  • Addressed feedback requests from Kojima Productions on environment art assets.
  • Used Substance Painter to create believable rust and weathering details.
  • Used Photoshop actions to quickly check textures for PBR accuracy.
  • Created LODs for assets.
  • Did extensive work on the WW1 scene assets.




Unannounced Unreal Engine 4 Title
  • Created all particle and material effects.
  • Integrated intro cinematic anims with Unreal Engine 4's Sequencer.
Link to promotional video



Tech Art / Generalist on "Drawn to Death" (PS4)
  • Extensive and broad use of Unity, including profiling performance and debugging rendering on PS4.
  • Worked with programmers to create tools for quickly integrating character costumes.
  • Coded custom shaders with geometry manipulation, stylistic expression of lightmaps, decals, grid UV animation, etc.
  • Worked with artists to discover optimal asset creation workflow.
  • Created character and weapon rigs.
  • Designed the level (Mt. Killmore).
  • Created almost all particle effects.
  • Created a workflow for warping wide angle live-action camera footage to suit the texture mapping of spherical geometry to make a video environment.
  • Created many level-based gameplay "gags", and almost all of the tutorial level interactivity via a Unity plugin called Play Maker.
The below video shows the live-action footage as it appears in game, followed by the tutorial level, and then a match on the level that I designed, Mt. Killmore.





UI Artist / Programmer on "Sorcery" (PS3)
  • Assembled inventory UI and main menu with supplied graphics in Adobe Flash (now Adobe Animate) using ActionScript.
  • Displayed dynamically structured images of items in a grid layout.
  • Handled controller input.
  • Worked with lead programmer to create functions in ActionScript that communicated with UnrealEngine 3 via ScaleForm.





Particle Effects on "PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale" (PS3)
  • Worked with level designers and referenced original games to re-create effects in the correct style.
  • Adapted to unique particle effect creation workflow in the Bluepoint Engine.
Created particle effects for the levels shown below.

Stowaways
Dojo
Franzea
Invasion
Dreamscape
San Francisco
Paris
Columbia



3D Artist / Programmer on "PlayStation Home" (PS3)
  • Integrated furniture items and character clothing items.
  • Created thumbnail images, collision, and entered supplied localized text.
  • Modified outsource art to ensure items fell within memory and polygon budgets.
  • Programmed complex behaviors into some items with Lua Script, including networking and player camera control.
  • Created particle effects with code driven parameters.
  • Created diverse UV scrolling effects using UV layouts on geometry and / or texture grid animation.
  • Created furniture items from scratch, some pictured below.




Personal Projects



Unreal Engine 4 - Ramp Maker
  • Tool for connecting walls to floors with a curved ramp. Procedural mesh generated with collision, manipulated with spline controls and an array of "ramp points".




Unreal Engine 4 - Particle Effects





Unreal Engine 4 - Custom Vehicle Suspension
  • My own take on vehicle suspension instead of using Unreal's built-in vehicle.




Unreal Engine 4 - Project Spline on to Terrain as Procedural Mesh Road
  • Procedural mesh road creates below path of a spline. The mesh has an elevation parameter to lift the geometry and avoid clipping through the terrain.
Road geometry conforms to terrain. Procedural road blueprint.



Unreal Engine 4 - Triplanar Grid Material
  • Used dot product operations to create a triplanar mask for a grid generated from world coordinates.
Triplanar grid material. Graph for triplanar grid material.



Unreal Engine 4 - Recover Decal Capability After Disabling Pre-Pass
  • Teams working with Unreal Engine 4 may sacrifice decal functionality in order to disable the pre-pass and increase performance. This is a way to restore decals without having to re-enable the pre-pass. Static mesh is a cube with inward normals, material has depth test disabled. This will work with instanced static meshes with some edits.
Multiple decals on terrain Decal blueprint



Unity Mobile Game
  • Created in Unity using C# programming and the Android SDK.


Link to Glomp on Google Play



Paintings, Acrylic on Canvas





Engagement / Wedding Rings