Portfolio

This project delivers a plugin that integrates a speech‑driven AI model into animation pipelines, enabling the generation of facial animations from portraits and audio inputs. It is still a prototype, but the idea behind it is to help animators create expressive facial motion based on video generation while maintaining full control over the animation data directly within Maya. Link thesis https://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/MastersProject/MSc25/06/index.html Github Repository https://github.com/DanielaHz/Speech-Driven-to-3D-Facial-Animation?tab=readme-ov-file

The project began as an attempt to simulate the behavior of a human heart using an open‑source soft‑body physics engine. The original approach relied on surface‑based soft body meshes, where each vertex in the mesh was treated as a mass point connected to nearby points through springs. This method, inherited from the Jelly Engine, generated springs exponentially relative to the number of vertices. Although computationally inefficient, it produced acceptable results for simple, low‑resolution models because the dense spring network created the illusion of internal volume, allowing the mesh to deform elastically despite being only a surface representation....

When working on a project, artists often accumulate a lot of unused assets, including static meshes, blueprints, levels, and more. This can make the project bulky and difficult to manage. The packaging process can become time‑consuming and may fail due to the excess of unused assets. To resolve this, there are two main options: manually deleting the unused assets, which can take hours depending on the project, or migrating the level to a new project, which can be risky because there are usually issues with missing assets....

This game was developed alongside the CleanMaster plugin in Unreal Engine, became a fun way to explore the different tools artists use to design worlds in the engine.

The project focuses on the development and implementation of custom shaders for the procedural rendering of a 3D dumbbell model, using the RenderMan rendering engine and the Python API Github Repository https://github.com/DanielaHz/Procedural_Dumbbell_Renderer

Mystic Gestures is a first-person game developed in Unreal Engine 5, where players explore ancient ruins using AI gesture recognition to cast spells and interact with the environment. The game recognizes hand gestures via a camera, allowing players to trigger various magical effects and interact with the environment using common mechanics found in regular games. The final product is designed to be a cinematic demo experience that showcases the implemented technology while providing an engaging and immersive gameplay experience....

The origin of ideas is a mystery that we have yet to unravel. Throughout the day, our minds can generate hundreds of ideas and thoughts, but only a few convince us to take action and bring them to life. In this project, my goal was to explore the concept of an impossible staircase and imagine ideas as small entities bouncing around the mind randomly. This is my interpretation of how ideas interact in my mind and how, in order to perceive them, we need to observe them from a specific angle to find the necessary sense and coherence, just like with an impossible staircase....

In this project, I developed a program to simulate cloth behavior using the Mass‑Spring‑Damper approach. The cloth is represented as a 2D grid of point masses connected by springs and influenced by forces such as gravity. The objective is to model the physical interactions between these point masses to realistically mimic fabric dynamics as the cloth responds to gravitational forces. Github Repository https://github.com/DanielaHz/2D-Cloth-Simulation-using-the-Mass-Spring-Damping-Approach

A curve is basically a continuous line that is not straight. It can be smooth, like splines, or made up of connected straight segments, like polylines. Applications are widely and can come in subtle forms, such as the creation of fonts that we use to write in our technological devices. In this project, I start implementing the parametric formulas of Cubic Bézier curves and Cubic B-splines to create curves and piecewise curves in the 2D space to poosteriorly used in the base contruction of surfaces of revolutions and generalized cylinders....