In the Spring of 2026, my team lead at the LIVE Lab asked me to reorganize the entire 3D art assets repository. The repository consisted of thousands of static meshes, thousands of textures, hundreds of HDAs, and an infinite number of Maya/Substance/Zbrush files.

So I got to work and began renaming assets according to our lab's standard naming conventions. But then I realized that this could end up taking up to 50 hours just renaming files and making errors along the way because I'm doing everything by hand. With this in mind, I decided to make a file-renaming tool to organize our repository! That way, I could not only do my task faster, but I could also give the tool to the team to make their lives easier with naming conventions for years to come.

The key features that I wanted were:

1. The ability to look through a folder and flatten the directory

2. Checking for proper naming conventions per file type (Ex. "S_" for static meshes (.fbx, .obj))

3. Counting assets with the same name and adding a "_#" suffix when necessary

4. The ability to identify texture type by scanning the name of texture files

5. The ability to redirect all texture files to a "Textures" folder

6. The ability to copy all HDAs into our separate HDA Library, and rename them based on what project they were for

   • I felt that this was an especially important task because it prevents us from doing work that other lab members had done in the past. Oftentimes, I found myself creating HDAs, and afterwards, my lead told me someone had made that 2 years ago. With this functionality, lab members can see every HDA that we've ever made!

So I got to work! I finished this project in about two weeks, which was significantly less time than it would have taken if I renamed every asset by hand. It was also helpful to my own personal skill development, as I hadn't touched Python since my Freshman year programming classes. This assignment was a great refresher and learning task!

Here is a display of the tool in action:

As you can see, I created my own custom UI as well. This was my first time ever creating a UI for my Python projects, and I created it in Qt Designer. All buttons and the title were created by me in Adobe Illustrator. I included a button where the user can select their desired folder, a dropdown where they can pick the project their asset is for, and a field to insert an asset name.

In addition, I found it useful to break up the buttons by file type instead of just having one button for all of it. That way, for example, the user could only rename Maya files if they wanted to, because the .fbx files had special naming conventions. Or they could only clone their HDAs into the HDA Library.

Here is a visual breakdown of the logic:

This was a super rewarding project at the end of the day! It helps my teammates and any future hires out with file organization. I hope to do a lot more Python projects like this in the future!

The Tree Generator is a tool that I made for a project at the LIVE Lab. We needed the ability to create a bunch of trees with ease for multiple different landscapes! Therefore, instead of opening up SpeedTree and creating dozens of different trees, I figured that I would just make a tool for that.

This HDA works by resampling points along a line and growing branches out from there. For this tool, I wanted to experiment with the "golden angle". The golden angle is essentially when leaves, branches, or other structures grow around a stem (~137.5°) to help them avoid directly overlapping, giving each leaf better access to sunlight, rain, and airflow!

There are a bunch of different controllable parameters for the growth of the tree (looking back, almost too many parameters).

Here is a breakdown of the HDA in use:

A functionality that I found especially important for this HDA was the ability for the artist to choose between hand-modeled leaves and leaf cards. We were debating between making the leaves a material and actually hand-modeling leaves, so I left that decision open and supported both options!

This procedural building was my first deep dive into procedural generation in Houdini. I had made HDAs, VFX, and simulations before, but had never dug deep into making a complex HDA. So I decided to do just that in a couple of months!

I made this project for both my Game Development and Creating Digital Environments classes. I decided to follow Anastasia Opara's Lakeside Houses tutorial series. It was a wonderful series and taught me so much about creating systems that work together. It was great for a medium-length project!

Here is a logic breakdown:

And here are a bunch of the seeds generated by the HDA!:

One of the biggest obstacles I ran into was with the roofing. Getting all of the different roof directions to mesh together was super complicated! What I ended up doing was booleaning any roof sections that intersected each other so that there wasn't any overlapping geometry!

All of the modules (except for the plants and the stairs from the Substance 3D assets library) were made by me for this project. To be honest, I had a little bit of scope creep going on for this project because I was so convinced that I wanted to be an environment artist as well at the time. So about two weeks of time was wasted creating and surfacing modules that never ended up being in the final product.

But all of it was so rewarding and taught me a lot! I'm so excited for my next procedural generation project where I get even more complex with my systems and hopefully not die from scope creep again.

Finally, here are some bonus renders:

Over the summer of 2026, I wanted to go into a kind of procedural generation I had only done from tutorials before: generation along a curve! I was inspired by Japanese tea gardens, and how they naturally transition from pathways to stairs to bridges. So I created a tool that takes the angle of the terrain below it between each point and the distance between each point and the ground to automatically place the correct path types along the curve!

Here is a quick video of the tool in action:

Within the tool are essentially three separate tools: One for the path, one for the short bridges, and one for the large bridges.

For both types of bridges, the planks are procedurally generated, as well as any accompanying geometry!

The stone path tool automatically places fences with breakup and variation alongside both sides of the path! In addition, the smaller cubes scattered alongside the path stones are essentially points where plants, pebbles, etc. could be placed procedurally.

I had a lot of fun with this project, and it served as a valuable learning experience on how to make different HDAs work together!