Portal Harmony is a project team from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, brought together by a shared interest in the link between film and games and virtual production.
Xiangming (Rick) Ka – Technical Artist/Programmer
Xiangming Ka is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. He has demonstrated work experience in the video game industry as a Technical Artist. His interests lie in the interdisciplinary area in the game industry, including Computer Graphics, 3D Modeling, Lighting, and Texturing.
Xiangming’s past professional experience includes an internship at Unity Technologies focusing on Render Feature development, Shader creation, Asset improvement, and Physically-Based Lighting. With a Computer Graphics programming background, he has a great understanding of the render pipeline and shader creation. He has strong knowledge of Physically-Based Rendering principles in texturing and shading. Also, he is familiar with DCC packages such as Maya, Zbrush, Houdini, and Substance.
Zizhuo (Joy) Wang – Environmental Artist
Zizhuo Wang is passionate about making games, he is a student currently studying for his master’s degree at ETC. He is good at visualizing ideas using tools like Maya, Substance Painter and Procreate, etc. He is also interested in making shaders and textures to create better visuals for games.
Xintong (Sandra) Liu – Character Artist/Co-Producer
Sandra is a 3D and virtual production artist with a background in game design, web development, graphic design, and animation. She was drawn to the entertainment technology center at Carnegie Mellon University as a further study in technical art, rendering, and virtual production in film. She has a passion for the future CGI technology pipeline and development. So far, at ETC, she is developing relevant skills such as motion capture animation and game engine implementation in film.
Tuesday Becker – Director/Co-Producer
Tuesday Becker is a filmmaker, producer, and sound designer from Austin, Texas. She is most interested in the intersection between film and games and working within cross-disciplinary creative teams. Currently, she is directing and co-producing a music video utilizing Unreal Engine, Motion-Capture, and VFX.
Sheenu You- Animator/Rigger/Mocap Handler
Sheenu You is an animator and digital illustrator who works with both 2D and 3D mediums. He is interested in game design and the game development process and strives to improve his character rigging skills along with his other abilities. He hopes to work as an artist in the game industry or in film/television. Like the monkey he is, he’s always willing to learn new things
Faculty Advisors
Ralph Vituccio
Ralph Vituccio is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), as well as teaching in the IDeATe and the English Departments at CMU. At the ETC, Ralph lead a number of award-winning student interactive projects dealing with social issues such as an interactive graphic novel addressing sexual assault on college campuses and a Virtual Reality interactive experience exploring racial profiling which was presented at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.
Scott Stevens
Scott Stevens has extensive experience in the areas of games, and augmented and virtual reality for education. He has been involved with multimedia research and development for over forty years. Scott began his career at CMU in 1987 in the Software Engineering Institute where he and his research team created the world’s first digital video CD-ROM, a virtual reality learning system that allowed users to carry on conversations with simulated personae.
In 1996 Scott moved to the Human-Computer Interaction Institute where he was a co-principle investigator of the Informedia Digital Video Library project. Informedia research applied speech recognition, image processing, and machine learning to automatically analyze video. For that work, he received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence. Also beginning in 1996, he taught part-time at the then newly created Entertainment Technology center. Scott joined the ETC full-time in 2008.