CONTACT INFO:

ollie.y.yao@gmail.com | ollieyao.com

1. Rainy Day:

Created in Houdini, rendered with Solaris and Karma. I wanted to tackle photorealism with a simpler simulation I'd be able to polish, and so I chose to do raindrops beading on a window. Raindrops were created with POP simulations, with additional splashes generated using FLIP fluids. This project marked my first foray into Solaris, Karma, and USD workflow, something I'm very excited to learn more about in the future! Window sill was modeled in Maya and textured in Substance Painter.

2. Caterpillar’s Day Out

Modeled in Maya, fur simulation done in Houdini with Vellum, then exported back into Maya for render with Redshift. The project was inspired by a Dr. Seuss look, but rendered in 3D. Fur simulation is something I’ve been meaning to tackle for a while - the pipeline is difficult to figure out at first but once I got it ironed out everything went pretty smoothly!

3. Google - Holocene Carbon Removal

Created at HOPR Studios, we needed to represent the risk that carbon dioxide posed to the environment through red dots and smoke in order to highlight the importance of Holocene's carbon capturing technology. HOPR renders with Redshift in Maya, so to fit with their pipeline I used Redshift proxies generated in Houdini and ported them over to Maya, intentionally giving myself enough control to adjust the shaders in render without having to reexport caches from Houdini.

4. "Bad Apple!!" On An Apple

FX Animation and source images for texturing generated in Houdini. Texturing, lighting, and rendering done in Blender Cycles. A loving recreation of the Bad Apple!! animated music video originally created in 2012, which has spawned countless reimaginings. I wanted to create a carved apple look, and so I used Houdini to generate a set of displacement maps automatically sourced from the black and white images in the original music video, then projected it onto a series of randomized apples to give a stop motion look.

5. "Twin Sparks" Short Film

Twin Sparks is Heather Yun and I's SVA senior thesis film set to come out in Spring 2023! I've always been inspired by stylized 3D, and am super excited show off all I've learned about the medium in this film! I'm responsible for the shading, lighting, and FX in the film, which was done in a combination of Houdini, Blender, and Nuke.

There are a number of FX based solutions I came up with for the film, including a procedural bush and tree generator to populate the forest, as well as a custom look for the fire in the film using Vellum simulations to drive the motion of each flame!

Music is "I Lost All My Eggs" by Shawn Wasabi.