A Change in Direction

It has been a long time since I have posted anything here.  I've made a slight career change and added the word "Technical" before "Artist" to my title.  Back in March of 2013, the company I worked at had shut down and gave me a chance to look at my current career path.  As an artist, I have worked at many companies, but it was usually for a project or two.  Companies had a tendency to layoff artists fairly often or outsource their jobs overseas for a much cheaper solution.  Due to this, I started to improve on my technical skill sets and learn a lot more about programming.

A few months after the layoff, I landed a new job at Seasun Games as a Senior Technical Artist building tools, creating animation state-machines and designing pipeline architectures.  It truly is amazing what you can accomplish in a short time if you really put your mind to it.  I still do art on the side, as it is my true passion.  Being able to create tools and infrastructure has helped augment mine and many other's abilities to do so too.  I'll be making a series of posts that will outline some of the projects I have been working on, and the theory on how some of these are done.  It's nice to back!

A few Gundams I have worked on during the gap!

Final Fantasy Realm Reborn

I've been playing Final Fantasy Realm Reborn a lot lately, and decided to do a sketch of my character.

Batman!

Was reading some comics and just had to draw Batman.

Gundam Exia Dark Matter 1/100

Just finished building the Exia Dark Matter 1/100 Gundam!  Great and fun build.  Some pieces do fall out a bit easily, so I'll just glue those pieces on.  All damage detail done using the Tamiya weathering kits.  Those things are just great.

New Website Coming Soon!

I have decided to finally make a website after all of these years.  It is currently still a work in progress.

website: dnguyenart.net

A digital drawing for a friend

Here's a digital drawing I made for my friend Laura.

Painting of Anna Kendrick

I recently found the time to watch Pitch Perfect, and really enjoyed the film.  I decided to go ahead and do a painting of the main actor of the film.

Painted using Photoshop

Samsung Galaxy SIII

Here's a model I made of my Samsung Galaxy SIII.  It was made last year as an example model for my students in the Hard Surface and Organic Modeling class.

Modeled in Maya.  Rendered using Mental Ray.

It's been a long hiatus

It's been a while since I've last updated this blog.  I feel it's time I start updating it again.  A lot has happened since my last post.  First off, I started working at Maxis in August and have shipped a title while working there as a 3D Generalist.  The company has been great!  The people are awesome, and I get to work on a franchise that I've adored as a child.  It's always nice to be able to work on something that you've only dreamed about working on since childhood.  I can't say we didn't have any hitches during the launch, but we can only hope it goes much more smoothly next time.




Here are a few other pieces I have worked on.

A female sculpt using ZBrush


An old male sculpt using ZBrush


An ink/painting of Loki for a friend


There were plenty more pieces, but I just don't like them that much anymore.  Tis the life of an artist.

Painting for my Grandma

This is a painting I made for my grandma using Adobe Photoshop CS6.