Overview

In addition to the RenderMan Art Challenges I've participated in, I occasionally also do small personal CG art exercises for practice and fun. I'm a programmer, not an artist, but my job is to make great tools for artists to use (to in turn make great art), and I'm a big believer in the idea that a tool maker should have at least a basic understanding of how users will use said tools. These personal art exercises are a part of how I keep up with how CG artists work.

Here I've collected together some of the pieces I've made that I like the most. Obviously when compared with the work made by the actual artists I work with, this isn't necessarily the most amazing stuff, but I think these are pretty alright for programmer art! These are in order of newest to oldest. Click on each image to see the full-size 4K version.

Some of these projects have HDR versions; if your browser/display combination supports viewing HDR, a toggle will appear below giving the option to enable HDR on this page!

Distant Storm

Created as an exercise in making and rendering convincing clouds, and also as a vehicle for testing out RenderMan 26's XPU volumes features. The clouds are made using a combo of kitbashed prefabs from Break Your Crayons and custom simulation using the clouds toolkit in Houdini 20. Additional assets from Evermotion and Quixel Megascans. Scene assembly and additional modeling in Maya and rendered using RenderMan. Created in 2025.

Computational Photography

This project was originally meant to be my entry to RenderMan's "SciTech" Art Challenge, but I stopped work midway through to focus on the birth of my daughter. I finished this project up later for fun. The foreground characters I modeled in Maya, and the background city I modeled in Blender, with final scene assembly in Maya. I made almost everything, with the exception of the birds and the cars, which are modified from off-the-shelf models. Rendered using RenderMan. Created in 2024-2025.

New and Old

Created as an exercise in making a more urban sort of scene. I tried to put as much detail into the inside of the main building as I did for the outside, which proved to be an interesting challenge to balance. Uses assets from Evermotion and Quixel Megascans, and the various Macs use Apple's official USD files. Scene assembly in Maya, rendered using RenderMan. Created in 2025.

Minerva Base

Created as an exercise in building a huge-scale environment. The core base is kitbashed together from Kitbash3D's "Mission to Minerva" kit; then, around the base I created several square miles of marsh environment that was designed to be detailed enough to put the camera basically anywhere. Additional assets from Evermotion and Quixel Megascans, with HDRI skies from PG Skies. Instancing and scene assembly in Maya, rendered using RenderMan. Created in 2024.

Lake Cabin

Made as an exercise in building a detailed medium-scale environment using lots of layered scattered instances. I focused on making the environment hold up well both very close up and from wider angles. Made mostly in Maya and rendered using RenderMan. Uses assets from Evermotion and Quixel Megascans. Created in 2023.

Lupine Forest Cabin

My first serious attempt at building a detailed environment setting. I learned a lot about using Maya's Xgen and MASH scattering toolsets while making this piece. The moss and the volumetrics/mist were particularly fun to work on. Rendered using RenderMan. Uses assets from Evermotion and Quixel Megascans. Created in 2021.

Minecraft in RenderMan

Made as a small exercise to try out RenderMan's at-the-time brand new RIS path tracer, and to try out building a pipeline to extract geometric data out of Minecraft save files. Making nice cinematic renders of Minecraft worlds is now a pretty commonplace thing, but at the time I did this project, these types of renders were way less common. Created in 2016.

Blog Posts

For each exercise, I write up a making-of blog post mostly as a way to organize my own notes for what I did and what I learned on each project. A lot of these posts also contain additional renders not shown here. Posts are listed starting with the most recent:

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my wife, Harmony Li, for her patience and support and for always giving great feedback and suggestions on these exercises.