Hello!

   My name is Dana Muise, I'm a technical artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm an avid gamer, programmer, animator, painter, sculptor, surfer, dad and I am fanatical about all creative technology.

   My favorite development tool is Unity along side C#, but I am always experimenting with new platforms. Every company may have a different idea of what a technical artist is, but there is a quality they all share: the ability to understand the needs of both the artist and engineer. We are problem solvers, we fill the void between the right brain and the left.

Frost Shader effect created in Spark AR, for Facebook’s holiday collection on Portal.

One of my favorite artists is Joseph Albers, best known for his iconic color square paintings. His work is considered invaluable to color theory. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could recreate his most recognizable paintings, but animate the colors? Here are the results. The two small boxes never change. View this on Shadertoy

View this on Shadertoy.

View this on Shadertoy.

View this on Shadertoy.

Augmented reality effects are hilarious! I created many using Instagram’s proprietary toolkit Spark AR while working at Facebook Messenger team. These are a few of my favorites.

Here are some samples of GLSL fragment shaders I wrote to be used within Facebook’s AR Spark Studio. The shader code can be viewed on GitHub: Simulated lens flare, Game Boy effect, Earthquake .

This was a test, comparing draw calls of traditional CPU rendering with GPU instancing on a  mathematically generated surface. The animation was created with a 100 X 100 grid of cubes. Movement was created by applying a sin wave to the x & z position of each object, over time (t).  f(x, z, t)= Sin(pi * (x + t)).  The shader was modified to change colors based on the object's y coordinate.

This was a test for a for a freelance client of mine. We created an AR app in Unity with Vuforia's image tracking SDK. They wanted to see how it would work with multiple image targets, on small hand-held physical objects.

This is a mobile app I worked on as a Unity technical artist at Playstudios Inc. Royal Charms Slots was developed for King Games for iOS and Android. It shipped spring of 2018. 

The Virtual Huton is an Oculus Rift companion piece to the Award winning independent film "The Last Days of Beijing Hutongs" by Wiemin Zhang. Project Design: Wiemin Zhang. It was a collaborative student project at SFSU.

Character study: I created a sprite based character in Photoshop then rigged it in Spine. The spine animation will be controlled with Unity Mechanim. 

This is a demonstration of my senior project at SFSU, 360 AR Viewer. It was made for the film students of SFSU as a place to showcase their 360 VR photography and video footage. The geotracking allows them to place it anywhere in the world was created with the Google Maps API.  The augmented reality capabilities were created with Vuforia and Unity 5.3  Video texture maps by EZ Movies.

Testing the face tracking filter of Facebook's ARstudio. The model was created in Maya. Programmed in javascript. 

Case studies

This is under construction.