Jeff Adams Portfolio

- ABOUT -

Hello world, my name is Jeffrey Adams. I am a passionate game developer with a diverse background of skills and experiences. The first few years of my career were spent as an architectural illustrator, creating detailed renders of buildings that were being designed. I learned how to accurately create 3D models of structures and other assets from blueprints and photo reference. My analytical side that likes technical challenges meant that I was also assigned more technical tasks such as troubleshooting why certain scenes would not render, managing the render farm and figuring out new more efficient workflows to speed render times. After this I made the choice to focus more on technical areas by returning to school for software development. After one year at college, I found work as a Java web developer. I’ve now spent the last seven years working for various companies with different technologies and am a capable software developer. At the same time my passion for games and other interactive technology lead me to learn related technology in my spare time. I started with OpenGL and developed my own primitive game engines. However, I realized I wanted to work more with gameplay systems instead of lower engine level code and switched to working with off-the-shelf engines. I decided to focus on Unreal Engine 4 as I had already had a working knowledge of the engine having done some modding and level design on previous versions of the engine. I now have a solid understanding of the fundamentals of the engine and have even released my own game called Cube Full of Mines.

- PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE -

- ARCHITECTURE PROJECTS -

Cube Full of Mines is a 3D update to the classic game of Minesweeper powered by Unreal Engine 4. As a sole-developer project all design, programming and art were produced by me. This included developing custom gameplay logic in both C++ and Blueprint, coding actor classes such as the cube to be easily reskinned using blueprints, designing input schemes for both mouse and controller play (not recommended, but hey it's there if you really want it), designing and implementing user interface systems including the main menu and hud and also implmenting a save/load system for the high score table. The game features five distinct environments that the player can select. Each of these environments required custom level layout, modeling and texturing.

C++ and Blueprint Development
Blueprint Re-skinnable C++ Actors
Level Design
Textureing
Modeling
Materials
Motion Graphics
User Inferface Menu and HUD
Animation Blueprint

Cube Full of Mines is currently available on the itch.io website Visit

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This was an experimental project to use textures to allow arbitrary deformation of static meshes, for use with such things as precalculated fluid simulations. It involved creating a custom export script for 3DS Max to analyze a deforming mesh and bake the vertex positions and normals into a pair of textures and creating a matching export mesh that would be imported in to Unreal. A custom material was then created to read the textures and apply them to the vertices using the World Position Offset.

Based on 2017 GDC talk 'The Illusion of Motion: Making Magic with Textures in the Vertex Shader'

Inspired by the Gamasutra article "Game Design Deep Dive: Creating believable crowds in Planet Coaster" this project was an effort to create large crowds while maintaining playable framerates. The resulting system can support roughly 4000 characters on mid-range specs (i7-7700HQ/GTX 1050 Mobile) at 30 fps. It achieves this performance with two methods. First it does not use the navigation mesh for pathfinding. It instead uses a flow field navigation system. A flow field for each possible destination is generated at start-up. The characters are then assigned one of these destinations and they follow the flow field to their goal. These flow fields update asynchronously to take into account the position of the other characters as an obstacle to enable crowd avoidance behaviour. The second method to increase performance is the characters are not separate actors. The entire crowd is a single actor making use of hierarchical instanced static meshes. Location, rotation and animation (using baked vertex animations) of the characters is then handled within the material.

The Starry Expanse is a project to recreate the game "Riven: The Sequel to Myst" with Unreal Engine 4. I worked on the project to help reverse engineer the locations of the cameras from the original 2D images. These shots proved challenging as there were limited available angles with a sparse feature set. I developed a new process using a type of photogrammetry to improve both the speed and accuracy when matching these shots.

Offline software based ray-tracer coded in C++. Featuring KDTree ray acceleration, fresnel, refraction, multisampling anti-aliasing and environment maps

Web Developer

STMicroelectronics Website (www.st.com) Support Project

Worked on a team to support and enhance a custom content management system based on Documentum built with Java
Investigated bugs and issues reported by client to determine priority
Gathered requirements, designed, developed, tested and supported enhancements for new releases to the existing platform
Streamlined and improved support processes
Updated documentation for support processes

Worked at the cable company Foxtel in Sydney, Australia. Collaborated with a small team to build tools for internal customers. These projects largely were web-based (Java/HTML/JavaScript) for the company intranet or using enterprise service bus technology to integrate existing applications together.

Responsibilities

Evaluate feasibility and impact of user requests for new or improved functionality or tools
Aided architect or lead programmer with design of systems
Helped implement functionality once designed (Java, Mule or Camel)
Support and improve systems after deployment

Projects

Worked on a team to develop the video ingestion system for the Presto video streaming service. Our part of this large effort was to implement a system to find and gather media assets from several different media repositories with their own API's. This involved creating an abstraction layer for our content storage systems by creating an API that would translate requests to a specific API for the individual storage system. The system collated and validated metadata for media and then transferred to the encoders.
Developed simple Web (HTML5) based UI's that interfaced with existing applications through their API's.
Developed a Java class to handle common FTP functions.
Wrote a Spring based REST API to export scheduling data from an Oracle database.

Worked as lead developer for Dayton, OH based Lexis Nexis on projects relating to updates to security auditing and recording for Lexis Nexis single-sign-on process. These projects were full-stack in nature involving everything from updating Oracle database tables and stored procedures, Java-based API endpoints, Front-End (HTML,CSS,JavaScript) as well as security notification e-mails. This position also involved coordinating with stakeholders in other departments to address and plan system impacts and release scheduling.

Responsibilities

Coordinate with other departments to plan changes and updates to single sign on process
Implement agreed upon changes
Verify that changes are working properly and did not cause any regression of previous functionality