
Hello!
My name is Dana Muise, I'm a technical artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm an avid gamer, creative coder, 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. Below is some interesting stuff I’ve worked on here and there.
The Supernatural VR app is a target based fitness experience. Player milestones are rewarded with special bonus targets that produced special, themed effects. I have designed and created many of these using shuriken particle effects and custom shaders. Also, what you can see is the custom Target Testing tool I created to assist with performance testing these bonus targets. This C# Unity editor tool allows creators to select any target, slow down game speed or pause and switch between bats or gloves. It improves the development pipeline by 25% and expedites design review from weeks to hours.
For Supernatural VR Fitness I helped create a more interesting incentive to encourage members to invite friends on the app. This increased the number of customer referrals by 30%. I used Unity’s animation timelines, particle effects and a fragment shader on the airplane that supports a transparent color gradient.
In Horizon World for Quest I helped prototype the Quick Thanks feature; Players can choose between a variety of emojis and send them to another avatar. The features uses sprite animation, particle effects and audio triggers.
On the Meta Horizon World team we were tasked to port the platform to mobile and desktop. I helped prototype an interactive avatar emoji system for touch screen devices that provide a slightly different experience than one would see in Quest VR. This is very close to what is currently used in the final product.
Meta Assistant is a voice control feature across all Facebook surfaces. Here I created a prototype on the Portal device that demonstrates voice control with AR interactivity, using Spark AR (Meta’s proprietary Javascript based AR developer tool).
Frost Shader effect created in Spark AR, for Facebook’s holiday collection on Portal. This is a basic post processor fragment shader that applies a distortion mask from the edges over time. It was a very popular filter.
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.
Check out my latest book How To Draw Space Gladiators. Its a graphic novel that teaches you how to draw action comics!