3D Design and Animation Samples

All scenes built and rendered by Alex Goss

Filmmaking / Real-Time Experiences / Facilitated Projects (Teaching Portfolio)

Animation Reel 2021-2022

Blender, Unreal Engine 4/5, and Fusion 360

Filmmaking

Real Time Experiences

Onward
an Immersive Real-Time Experience
Unreal Engine 5
2022

Onward is a 3D immersive experience developed to reimagine an existing art exhibition space in Austin, Texas.

This simulation proposes accessible, real-world solutions to transform an unconventional, but beloved exhibtion platform into a place for community gathering and shelter from the Texas heat. This project goes beyond physical and material realities into fantasy to suggest a space of limitlesss possibilities.

The landscape topography, textures, and foliage are all developed in Substance Designer from scanned objects and surfaces of the real-world site at the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, Texas.

90% of the geometry in this simulation is built in Houdini. Models were textured in Houdini, or Substance Painter, or both, in addition to vertex shading techniques leveraging attributes set in Houdini.

Highlights include:

Player Ineractivity: animations and shaders respond in tandem with a procedurally generated soundtrack build in Unreal Engine 5's MetaSounds.

Procedurally animated vine and foliage growth.

Tiled textures developed from Midjourney AI.

Virtual Exhibition Space “Moonmist”:
Pixel Streamed Application
Unreal Engine
2020

Based on my physical backyard gallery space (Moonmist), I created an interactive virtual art exhibition to allow for artists to showcase their work when in-person exhibitions were not possible. I worked with artist and curator, Ariel René Jackson, to select the works for a specific virtual context and collaborated individually with each artist to translate their concept into real-time 3D experiences. I worked to ensure that the models I created captured each artist’s intention digitally. This virtual gallery enabled 60+ visitors at its opening (and hundreds more after launch) from around the world to simultaneously engage in meaningful conversations about identity and community in a moment of separation and instability.

Model and texture pipelines via Blender and Substance Painter

Player character animation / states, interaction behaviors, map / wayfinding, in Blueprints.

link to exhibition documentation

Facilitated Projects (Teaching Portfolio)

Student Project: “Not An Island”
Adjunct Professor “Space Research’”
Fall 2021

I assigned 13 teams of 4-5 students to synthesize/grow/mutate a biome from a seed/spore.

"Think of the seed as emanant or ancient, a colonizer or decolonizer, a destroyer or healer. It should be of consequence to its surroundings in some way. What is the seed’s history and the history of the land that surrounds it now”?

I produced a companion series of YouTube tutorials for my students to serve as reference and a foundation for visual and technical vocabulary.

I led students from conceptualization, to image capture, to processing and modelling pipelines in Blender. In addtion, I compiled their islands, and built a game application in Unreal Engine optimized to run on students’ Windows and Mac computers.

link to download game files

Student Project: “(De)Composition”
Adjunct Professor “Space Research
Spring 2022

I led two classes of 16 students through modelling, sculpting, and texturing pipelines in Blender.

“Using Blender, create a scene using a 3 dimensional composition of three unrelated objects in an unexpected juxtaposition; consider how this group will be seen from extreme viewpoints, from a bird's eye to a worm's eye.”

Each student was required to sucessfully upload their textured models to Sketchfab, demonstrating the importance of designing a fully explorable, 3D experience in addtion to file organization, and model / texture optimization.

Other Personal Projects