About Me

I am a self-taught game developer specializating in animation programming within the Unreal Engine. My formal training is in my physics (M.S. Physics) and engineering (M.S. Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering). If you're interested in my academic stuff, which is old and quite boring, you may check out my Google Scholar page.

Prior to delving into game development, I leveraged my degree(s) to serve as an adjunct physics professor at multiple colleges: Orange Coast College, Southern California University of Health Sciences, Cypress College, and CSU Stanislaus. However, while pursuing my PhD in physics at UC Merced, I decided to completely change course --- to get out of academia and become a game developer. Was that a stupid decision? Maybe, but I certainly don't regret it. My bank account has a few regrets though.

Since then, I have delved deep into animation-related topics in game development. While I'm certainly no animator, I tried my hand at animation and created the Unarmed Upright Standing (UUS) Animation Set, with the intent of ensuring all states blended well in Blendspace assets. Are the animations pretty? No, not at all. They look more stiff than I do when I run --- and I didn't know that was possible to achieve. But they meet the techincal requirements I aimed for at the start.

Soon afterwards, I created the Animation Matching Suite plugin. The flagship feature was its ability to pose match and distance match Blendspace assets. (The initial release of the plugin was two engine versions prior to Epic's non-experimental introduction of native pose matching.) I never understood why Epic did not (and does not) support Blendspaces for distance matching, so I made the feature myself --- using my UUS Animation Set to test the Blendspace capabilities.

After fiddling around so much with animations, I came to realize I truly dislike the process of animating. I'd rather just press some buttons to make things happen. Since I can't afford Maya, and since I dislike Blender, and since Cascadeur lacks many useful features, I decided to make the Anim Tools plugin (previously called MoCap Tools). It handles all the tedious and monotonous tasks I often found myself dealing with. It was also my first time attempting to use Slate. I discovered there is a reason "Slate" rhymes with "hate."

I also started a devlog. Due to health issues that came up near to when that project began, along with becoming a new father, I had to set that endeavor aside, at least for a time. But the general game development has not slowed.

Anyway...now what am I up to? Well, I'm grinding. I keep learning new things in the hopes I can actually make a living doing what I love: animation programming.