Interview alumni of Ringling Art&design GAD

Moon Su Park

Blizzard Heroes of Storm team FX artiest

What is the daily routine of FX artist?

     I go to the company around 10 am, and the meeting starts right away. The artist meeting holds with all FX and animator teams, because both departments  work or collaborate together often. The modeler team discusses the games with background and character teams in the meeting. The real work commences with the extensive meeting in every morning, discussing the current development circumstances of the effects, gathering up opinions from other team members, catching and solving any problems that have been occurred.  As the meeting ends, I start up with effect works in my desk. After having the lunch, I  do the game test which is currently developing and have fun with other team members.

I resume the effect work after lunch time, but if any important issues occur, there is one more meeting at 2 pm. This meeting is for brain storming the new characters or changing the effects in the games. Every team including producers, designers, sounds, animators joins the meeting. I work on the effect development until I get off, and wrap up daily works with one last meeting.

The difficulties when you first adapt to the company.

     In our school, Ringling Art and Design, uses Unreal engine, but other companies use their own pipelines. For example, my "Heroes of t Storm" team in Blizzard Ent., uses the pipeline of "Starcraft 2" ,thus, I have to work on 3DMAX. It was hard to change the tool from Unreal to 3DMAX at first time. But nothing to afraid of, because of the similarities of every game engines, it needs about a month to get used to it.

The motivation to be an FX artist.

     I liked the technical parts like materials, I have started learning effects during preparing the senior work for better producing. I fell in to the effects, and when I first applied in to Blizzard Ent. for joining the team of "Heroes of Storm" , I have had enough effect works for the portfolio.