Summary

Howdy, I'm Dylan Payne and I specialize in Character Rigging.

My most recent position was at Quarter Up working on Invincible VS, a tag team competitive fighter based on the comic series of the same name. There, I worked on Character Rigs, including Thula, RexSplode, and Universa, to name a few. I helped develop the rigging pipeline using a combination of custom tools, Vetala, and mGear, in order to maintain parity across all character files for the animators, and Unreal's joint systems. Within Unreal Engine 5, I worked on Character BP creation, Character Preview BPs, Animation BPs, Rigid Body Physics, Control Rig additions, Data Assets, Dismemberment Hookups and authoring, VO Anim hookups, and automated import processes for VO animations, of which I oversaw the creation process for that using Maya and Speech Graphics. I got to work on about half of the character roster and nearly every alternate skin made for the game, and got to work more closely with modeling to see what we couldn't and could achieve with skins, and had to ensure that skins could work with animation without direct animation support in most instances.

When I was employed at Dreamworks Animation as a Character Rigger, I focused on prop, wardrobe, and body rigging for Kung Fu Panda 4. Additionally, I logged a few new processes along the Wardrobe side of things, generally regarding Belts and Shoulderpads.

When I was employed at Rooster Teeth Animation as a Rigging Artist, I rigged 3D assets including creatures, props, environments, and vehicles, and also assisted in improving our code base. I worked closely with other departments to ensure asset quality. We had a proprietary rigging pipeline I was able to make small updates and changes to throughout the projects, and later upgrade the rigging side of the codebase to be compatible for a future Python 3 upgrade. I was also able to assist other rigging artists here on how to use the pipeline to keep asset fidelity high during the projects and troubleshoot workflow issues and bottlenecks. I worked on all sorts of rigging there from props to character bodies to faces, including some creatures. I also assisted in getting our rigs setup for other artists to be used in Unreal, mostly for Red vs. Blue scenes, and some touchups for Death Battle scenes. Additionally, I assisted in making sure rigs were motion capture compatible for shows such as RWBY and Red vs. Blue.

Throughout my time at A&M, I assisted in organizing and directing the Chillennium Game Jam, which is the largest student run game jam with over 300 participants and over 80 games made, with two international teams. For Chillennium 2017, I assisted as an Organization Lead. In 2018, I had the honor of being appointed to the position of Co-Director, as well as taking over the Participant Relations Chair position. I was the Director of Chillennium 2019, where we had a turnout of 400+ students attend from across the globe.

While attending A&M I had been employed at the LIVE Lab, a research lab whose goal is to promote education through interactive experiences within gaming. I had been worked there from November 2017 to December 2018 as a 3D Artist and Technical Artist, and have worked on projects such as Variant: Prime and ARTé Ancient. My 3D work here is done exclusively with Houdini, and in more recent projects I have been expected not only to 3D model and texture, but also provide technical work and scripts that can change the Houdini asset within Unity. I resumed work here in January 2020.

I attended a NASA Internship in Spring 2019, where I assisted in the creation of 3D models for Unity. These models would be used to demonstrate various procedures and tests that could be viewed safely within VR. Additionally, I assisted in pipeline management and research, helping to introduce Houdini into the pipeline.

Resume PDF

Skills

Software proficiency

Houdini

Maya

Unity

Unreal Engine

Python

Blender

Photoshop

After Effects

C++

Reel