Rising Stars: Meet Nuan Bai

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nuan Bai.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I used to work as an industrial designer in a kitchen appliance company. I was relatively young at that time, and I stayed in the company for about one year. Everyone’s life was very regular, starting at 8:30 in the morning and leaving at 5:00 in the afternoon. The company has cafeterias, gyms and arranged apartments. However, this regular life makes me feel extremely depressed. I seem to see at a glance that the 50-year-old me may be a small leader and continue to live a regular life, making concessions for the market, costs, and company planning and compromising my design over and over again. I made a decision right then and there that I wanted to change; I wanted to be exposed to new things; I didn’t want to stay the same; I wanted to do some interesting. After I quit, I tried several jobs, one of which was to do concept design for the Wandering Earth film. The director team thought my work was good, and they also needed someone with an industrial design background to do some work.

By chance, I fell in love with the concept design profession. In addition, I found my lack of professional knowledge through work, and I needed more professional training, so I went to Artcenter College of Design to study. The application process went smoothly, and I received a $40000 entrance scholarship. Then I met senior designers in the conceptual design community, such as John Park, Craig Mullins, Scott Robertson, Syd Mead, and so on. Each of them is like a shining star to guide the future, and I have learned a lot from them. And everyone in the school is working hard. Everyone is working towards the same goal and appreciating and helping each other. I’m very happy that I can grow up here.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The path of growth is not smooth. In the past four years, I have studied eight semesters, with an average of six courses per semester. The weekly class time of a course is five hours, and there are relatively five hours of homework. I draw pictures every day until my joints ache. I remember that there was a course on human anatomy just when I entered the school, in which we needed to remember 400 anatomical names of the human body. The teacher would explain the shape, function and which bones were connected to each muscle in turn. These were all contents to be examined, which was very difficult for me as an international student. At my craziest point, I slept four hours in three days. After that, human body dynamics, character costumes, and various software, such as zbrush, 3dcoat, blender, octance render, substance painter, unreal, etc. My interest also changed with the change of the class content. At first it was the role, and later I gradually became interested in the environment, composition, light and shadow, design, and post-painting. There are a lot of problems for me to overcome. Fortunately, I have completed the basic learning tasks and can have more time to explore my own style.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m an environment concept designer, designing environments for movies, animations, and games that they use. These scenes require a strong sense of story, of engagement, of reality, of beauty. To convey to the reader the story that the game or movie wants to tell. In other words, I use images to tell a story, and the process involves sketches, schematics, and renderings. Almost all in a digital way. I’m more interested in exotic alien life, and I’ve done a lot of conceptual designs for spacecraft and alien life. I am good at carving some organic shapes in zbrush and then using substance painter to paste the material, and finally rendering it in blender. The last steps are done in photoshop, such as adding some atmosphere, smoke, laser, etc. Because I’m good with zbrush and blender, there are a lot of organic elements in my work.

We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
I once asked my mentor, I said I saw other people’s work is so good; I compared with them. I was depressed and lost my goal, I didn’t know how to work hard, and I didn’t know where to go in the end. My mentor, John Park, told me that your goal is not to compare yourself to others, that there will always be people in the world who are stronger than you, taller than you, and better at drawing than you. You only need to compare yourself to yesterday, do what you should do every day, and you have already won. This statement had a profound impact on me, and I still agree with it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.artstation.com/maxxxxx
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bbnnnn9291/

Image Credits
All pictuers are my personal work. Nuan Bai