Subsurface
Skin
Multi-layer subsurface scattering and a custom BRDF — carrying heroes from cinematic close-up to real-time performance without losing the warmth of living tissue.
The hands-on years.
A decade of technical direction across film and games — shading systems, materials, rendering. Kept as the foundation underneath the current AI work: I automate what I first mastered by hand.
Reel below is from 2022, before Sony. For current AI work, see the Hair System case study.
Selected craft work, pre-Sony.
Shading the
unseeable.
A decade of skin, fabric, weather, and damage — rendered in the seam between film craft and real-time games.
Seven studies from production work at Naughty Dog and earlier shading research. Selected stills, captions written from the technical memory.
Subsurface
Skin
Secondary characters
The unsung work — dozens of secondary characters carrying the same skin pipeline, each tuned for the lighting moments of their scenes.
Fabric
Worn, lived-in
Worn denim, sweat-soaked cotton, military gear — fiber direction, anisotropic specular, and dirt as a first-class material, not a decal.
Snow
Burn, gore
The opposite of clean. Damage states that read at distance and hold up to camera — from forensic-grade gore to particulate snow scattering.
Wetness
Rain, sweat, submersion
Procedural and authored wetness layered over the existing pipeline, preserving readability under heavy rain and underwater sequences.
Emotion
Sweat, damage
Physiological response treated as a rendering problem — blood flow, micro-pore sweat, capillary flush — driven by performance, not paint.
Studies
& prototypes
Things that didn't ship — but defined what came next.
