We recently connected with Evelyn Sun and have shared our conversation below.

Evelyn, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Every time I work on rigging characters and see how they act lively in the game; I always feel great happiness and I really appreciate that I took the risk to change my career.

In my undergrad school, I studied electrical engineering as my major, which my parents recommended would provide me with a secure job and income. However, in my heart, I always have a strong fascination with art and games. I always enjoyed painting and sketching for the whole day, observing light and shade on the object. When I applied for grad school, I decided to pivot my major into entertainment technology to pursue my passion for art.

However, after I entered grad school, I realized how bold my decision was. I still remember our first assignment was to model, rig, and animate a dragon. I was still learning extruding surfaces and snapping vertices as I didn’t have any previous experience on 3D art, while others already made their dragons fly. It was very stressful and frustrating in the beginning, however, my passion in this field has always motivated me to keep learning and practicing. As a result, I become more and more familiar with the pipeline and confident in my work, and now I’m landing on my dream job to work on video games every day. I’m so glad that I took the risk and had the courage to step out of my comfort zone to pursue a different career that time.

Evelyn, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

With my fascination with art, I pivoted my major from electrical engineering into entertainment technology for my graduate study. Then I started learning 3D art and animation pipeline and found myself interested in rigging the most. As a result, I decided to become a technical artist, where I can also apply my interdisciplinary background from art and engineering.

I have worked on two games WWE 2K22 and Diablo 4. I learned great skills on rigging and simulation from both projects, and I kept motivate myself to develop my skillsets. In rigging, I designed and built joints and skeletons for the model and created controls for animators to animate it. For simulation, I set up simulations for cloth, hair, and any dangling parts on characters in the game.

When working on cloth simulations, silk, leather, feather, fur, every cloth piece has different feeling for weight, stretch, and texture, and I always try to tweak and polish every detail on the simulation setup to make them feel natural and real.

As I get more familiar with the rigging and simulation pipeline, I also keep seeking ways to expedite the current workflow. And I’d always love to learn new techniques and software, I learned Maya tools scripting and Houdini, and I found they brought me a procedural mindset, and inspired me to be more productive on the content creation.

I love every piece of my work. In Diablo 4, I had a deep impression on one complex legendary druid armor that I worked on. I accomplished the skinning and simulation part. It has a lot of fancy feathers and various dangling decorations. I researched related feather videos, actively asked for feedback from team, and kept polishing every detail on the simulation. Finally, I made the feathers look real and vivid, and they performed super cool on the character. I really love this armor set and hope druid players like it too! Another piece of the work I’m proud of is that I created various rigs for environment props, such as corpse and statues in the hell fort. With the rigs, animators added horrifying animations on them, and interactive designers helped positioning them in the scene. They helped a lot to bring an immersive and interactive experience in the dungeon and make it even dark and creepy. It’s always been great fun working on riggings for various monsters and creatures in the game, I’m looking forward to bringing more cool rigs to better support the game art production.

I really appreciate this opportunity to share my story. Hope you find it interesting and learn bit more about technical artists. I think the most important I wanted to share is that there’re unlimited possibilities in the life, and don’t be afraid to step out of the comfort zone to pursue things you truly love.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I studied electrical engineering in my undergrad years, however I never saw closely how electrons worked in a circuit. While when the first time I studied 3D art, I can directly see everything built up in the scene, which brought me a real accomplished feeling in my work.

Additionally, I always feel so motivated when hearing voices and feedback from players and audience. There are so many exciting moments working as an artist in game industry. Every time when there is a new trailer on the game released, I always feel great exciting and also a bit nervous reading comments from the audience, and it’s been really touched and motivated to see how players were eagerly waiting for the release as I do. The most rewarding moment must be on the launch day, and seeing millions of players flooding into the server. I entered in the game, and saw people wearing the armor set I worked on, and also realized that there are millions of players all over the world see my work.

I also always feel art is the media that connect the world together, and working as an artist to help build up this connection makes me feel great achievement.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

In my creative journey, my goal is to keep learning and becoming an expert in the field. I keep gaining knowledge when collaborating with people from different disciplines such as artists, animators, and designers. And there are also great resources, online tutorial videos, and good learning communities sharing in the industry. Therefore, I always feel excited to discover new skill sets and aspects in game art production. There’s never a ceiling or an ending to my journey, which feels like a roguelike game, that there’s always treasure awaiting me in the next room, and I’ll also enjoy every adventure and keep developing myself!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.artstation.com/evelynsun
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suntianheng/