NVIDIA Studio hosts concept designer Yangtian Li

NVIDIA Studio’s weekly creative content series shares the artworks of featured designers, along with their creative tips and tricks. It also aims to demonstrate how NVIDIA Studio technology accelerates creative workflows. This week, NVIDIA Studio welcomes Yangtian Li, Singularity6’s senior concept artist. Li is notable as a concept designer and illustrator who has worked on major video game franchises, including Call of Duty, Magic: the Gathering, and Vainglory. His work also appears in book illustrations and magazines.

Dreams of the Past (left) and Elven Archer-Yangtian Li

Li’s impressive portfolio includes character portraits of elegant and strong women. The background stories and the grace of the characters are inspired by their own life experiences and travels to different countries of the world.

Living in Seattle, Li’s artistic journey began in Chengdu, China. His hometown serves as the inspiration behind his remarkable portrait of the Snake Witch. This unique and provocative work is based on tribal black magic in Chinese folklore. Li drew and painted this piece with the NVIDIA Studio platform powered by a GeForce RTX GPU.

The Snake Witch is a product of Li’s fascination with black magic, “Gu”, where tribes witch doctors collect poisonous creatures and use them to make poisons and practice the dark arts. Li said, “I always thought stories were fascinating, so I wanted to make a design like this. Snakes appeal to me and help create some interesting compositions.”

After working primarily in 2D, Li turned to 3D to support the concept process. He continues, “Having a high-end GPU really helps speed up the process when it comes to using Blender, Zbrush, and the like.” These speedups are particularly noticeable with GPU-accelerated rendering in Blender Cycles 3.0, and the MacBook Pro M1 Max or more than 5x faster results with a GeForce RTX laptop GPU compared to a CPU

Snake Witch’s character drawing is in a good spot, while Li used the Liquify filter to deftly design her subject’s facial features. Liquify uses AI-powered Neural Filters to help artists explore creative ideas and make complex adjustments in seconds in Adobe Photoshop It has the distinction of being one of more than 30 GPU-accelerated features like i.

Li uses customization layers during the coloring phase of his process and creates design that doesn’t harm the design while trying to get the right hue. If he’s not satisfied with a format, Li can delete it without destroying the original image. Finally, Li adjusts the lighting using the Opacity feature to block light from the right side of the image and adds a bit of realism.

Being in a productive mood is as important to Li as it is to many artists, and the GeForce RTX GPU allows him to save more time in this magical creative space where ideas come to life faster and more naturally. . In his Studio work, Li details how he created the Snake Witch. The three-part video series includes the initial design, color and detail optimization and finishing touches.