While working at Walt Disney Studios, I pitched and created Well Done, Grogu, a short film designed to explore the possibilities of real-time filmmaking and character creation inside Unreal Engine 5.4. I wrote, directed, and built the project from the ground up, using the production as a sandbox to push cinematic storytelling through game engine technology.

Grogu and the Jawas I built entirely from scratch, complete with custom rigs, textures, and grooms. The Mandalorian character is a Disney asset that I rigged and animated.  This allowed me to establish a fully in-engine cinematic pipeline, from concept through to final render, where every asset was optimized for both performance and visual fidelity. The project became a testing ground for blending feature-level artistry with real-time workflows, bringing a Star Wars-inspired story to life with speed and creative flexibility that traditional pipelines can’t match.

MONSTERS AT WORK  ENVIRONMENT BUILDS AND FLY-THROUGHS

 While working as a 3D Asset and Previs Artist on Disney’s Monsters at Work Season 2, I created a series of Unreal Engine environment flythroughs to help visualize key sequences before animation. I also modeled and textured most of the environments and assets featured in these scenes. These real-time previews gave the team an early look at shot composition, pacing, and set design—bringing Monstropolis to life with dynamic camera moves and cinematic storytelling.

PRODUCTION GROOM

Building production-quality grooms for real-time use is a careful balance of complexity and efficiency. Hair and fur are inherently dense and expressive, requiring detailed control over shape, breakup, and flow, while still meeting the performance demands of a real-time environment. Achieving that balance means making deliberate choices at every level—ensuring the groom reads clearly, responds well to lighting and animation, and remains stable and performant inside Unreal Engine.

This groom for Sid, I created while at Walt Disney Studios, was built in Blender with Unreal Engine 5.5 as the final target. The process focused on preserving his distinctive, uneven fur patterns while structuring the groom in a way that could hold up in a real-time pipeline. The result is a production-ready asset that maintains character fidelity without compromising performance.

PRODUCTION 3D MODELING

This comparison highlights environment work completed for Monsters at Work Season 2. The base environment was modeled and assembled in Maya, with an emphasis on clean topology and faithful reconstruction of the production design.

The lighting pass was developed in Unreal Engine, where the scene was translated into a real-time context and refined using in-engine lighting, materials, and atmosphere. The goal was to preserve the original intent while exploring lighting and atmosphere passes in Engine.

Translating 2D artwork into 3D for film and animation is less about replication and more about interpretation. Concept art often suggests form through line, shape, and stylized proportion—qualities that don’t always translate directly into physical space. Rebuilding that work in 3D requires a sensitivity to the original artist’s intent, turning those visual cues into believable volume, surface, and light without losing what made the design compelling.

This piece—a 3D sculpture of Necron 99, I created based on William Stout’s artwork for Ralph Bakshi’s, epic animated film,Wizards (1977)—was approached with that balance in mind. Much of the work involved resolving what the illustration leaves open while preserving its distinctive character and attitude. The goal was not to reinterpret, but to carry the original design into 3D as faithfully as possible, allowing it to exist in a new medium without losing its identity.