Snap RnD
Second half of my tenure at Snap Inc was with the research team. During that time I got to test Lens Studio AR features in early development, provide feedback, bug reports, and create templates for the art team. Much of my work focused on body tracking, body mesh, cloth and hair sims, scripts, node-based shaders, and quality-of-life tools for Maya and 3ds Max.
My role: Technical Artist / Prototyper
Spring Physics Dress
Lens Studio’s Cloth Sim impacts performance on low-end devices and requires longer setup time.
I devised a few performant setups to imitate dresses using skinned joints and spring physics. The first approach relied on the distance between two opposing joints as the driver for blend shapes to imitate cloth deformation. The second used velocity and a vertex displacement shader to create flowy, lightweight fabric.
Lens Studio DCC Quick Link
Before the introduction of the plugin ecosystem, I developed a single-click bridge between Maya/Max and Lens Studio. Quick iteration is crucial when fitting face-attached meshes, world landmarks, and custom trackers. The bridge consisted of a MEL/Maxscript exporter and a Python agent that automatically detected new FBX files and navigated Lens Studio dialogs using HWND.
Multi-Point Costraint
I added functionality similar to Maya’s Point Constraint, it was used for motion blending and pinning objects to the rig directly in Lens Studio. The resulting transform can be offset towards either point and it can carry scale and rotation values as well.
Project Maker
Python tool that takes JIRA task ID and title and outputs a Git-friendly string, which is then used to create a standardized project folder structure that includes Maya/Max/Substance starter scenes with corresponding names, all of which can be configured for each department and individual artist.
LightWrap Shader
A shader that helps integrate 3D objects with a live environment. Camera texture is blurred and applied on top of the object using a mask.
The mask can be made in two ways - using Fresnel or edge detection + blur. This is a performant way to add a touch of realism to the standard PBR shader available in Lens Studio.
Hair Tools
Lens Studio uses NURBS curves as hair guides. I made several Max and Maya tools to speed up the process of making curves and exporting them as groups, allowing users to have individual control over the main layer, bangs, ponytails etc.