Finding New Suns With...

Your career uniquely blends art and technology. How did your background in digital art and animation from Digipen Institute of Technology influence your approach to technical art at Twin Suns Corp?

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My Fine Arts background helped me gain a keen eye for details and built the foundation for all mediums of art. The school also offered programming courses, allowing me to continue building my logical thinking and curiosity for technology.

 

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Technical artists merge artistic vision and technical implementation. How do you maintain this balance, advancing both your eye for art and skills in scripting?

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I practice some sketching whenever I have time. Often, I find myself observing my surroundings to study their features. For example, looking at a landscape and observing how the buildings would compliment each other and how different heights would play into the look and feel of an area. 

 

For scripting, I have a passion project that I do on the side as a programming playground to learn new languages and concepts. Keeping up with the latest graphical trends also helps me make judgement calls at work.

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Having worked on multiple Assassin's Creed titles, including Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, what technical tips and tricks can you share from working on such dynamic games?

 

Building a solid foundation is important. It does take a little more time to build foundations for games, but this allows for flexibility later on and easy bug fixes. For example, setting up the world to be larger than smaller, along with basic lighting, procedural, material pipelines and asset flows, so that later on in production, everything is smoother.

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Your contributions to the volcanic biome in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey are so gorgeous and complex! What were you most inspired by when working on the traits of the biome and how did you balance darkness such as fog and the harshness of volcanic rock with the serene beauty of sulphur pools and oceanic water?

 

We were aiming to showcase the lushness that the volcanic islands can bring and used that as the basis of our theme. We balanced the brightness of the colors against the harshness and softness of shapes. In the sulphuric pools, we used softer shapes on the terrain and removed any bumpy rocks, added fog to soften the look even more and desaturated colors. To make the vegetation's lushness stand out, we utilized brighter colors against the darker soil background to build contrast. To make the islands stand out uniquely, we also “painted”  the water different colors at different depths to bring in more colors.

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Although you specialize in technical art, your skills range from traditional mediums to 2D and 3D work. What mediums are you most passionate about, and how have they influenced your approach?

 

I often find myself enjoying crafting physical arts the most. Pottery, sewing, and the like where I have to have a rough plan in my head, gathering enough materials to begin the project. This method of thinking helps me plan a solid and flexible foundation in Technical Art topics and teach me to be agile when problems arise. If I run out of material during a project, I'll need to find a way to patch it or scale down if possible, thinking about as many scenarios as possible to pick the most optimal route.

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Being a technical artist can be one of the most challenging and constantly changing roles in the game industry. How do you stay updated with the latest and greatest advances in technology in your role as Senior Technical Artist at Twin Suns Corp?

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There are so many resources online which can help you catch up and understand the latest technology available to us. Following graphical topics has one of the biggest advantages in my role. While I don't have to implement the functionality at code level, it is always good to learn exactly how each new system works and what its limitations are. This will help us choose the right systems to use during production. Of course, as time permits, I have a little playground project where I experiment with everything I am interested in, which gives a solid outcome if one system works well with another.

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