Clickies, Culture Kits, and Exploding Bits: Props and Interactives in Diablo IV

Howdy, my name is Chaz Head, and I am the Lead Props and Interactive’s Artists for Diablo IV. I was born here in California but raised in a small town in Montana. Having aspirations of becoming an artist and with backing from my family, I moved to a slightly bigger town in Eastern Washington state. It’s there that I fell in love with 3D sculpting, and I knew what I wanted to achieve. I packed up everything I owned and drove from snowy Washington to the sandy beaches of Newport CA. Years of schooling brought me to the opportunity to apply for a Blizzard recruitment campaign that I thought would never pan out (as I had a growing portfolio of science fiction art but nothing to show for the booming World of Warcraft franchise). But I applied anyway, on the very last day of submissions. The thing I never thought would pan out started my career as an Intern on StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty, and I have been at Blizzard Entertainment ever since. I helped ship three StarCraft games: Heroes of The Storm, World of WarCraft: Battle for Azeroth, and of course, Diablo IV. For Diablo, I started my responsibilities as a senior artist when the game was still in pre-production. I was given the opportunity mid-development to join leadership for the first time in my career. And after 11 years as an independent contributor, I was overseeing an entire pipeline for one of gaming’s biggest franchises.

I currently reside in Fullerton, CA, and look forward to moving to South Orange County. I am a big fan of video games and play almost every day. I am also an amateur racing car driver having participated in over 60 events. Never a person to shy away from new hobbies, I recently picked up building, painting, and playing Warhammer 40k.

Hello, my name is David Tu. My friends call me D2, and I'm a staff Props and Interactives Artist on Diablo IV.

My very first experience making game art was back in 2013 when I attended a CG summer camp during high school where I learned the basics of 3D modeling in Maya. However, I ended up going to Purdue University to study computer science for my first year of college because of my parents' wishes. I couldn't adjust to the weather there and was struggling a lot with the major, since I had zero prior experience in the field. A year later, I got expelled from Purdue for underperforming and I came home feeling incredibly ashamed.

Luckily, my parents were understanding and supportive of my wish to pivot careers and pursue digital art, which I was much more passionate about. I later began my game art journey at Laguna College of Art & Design in 2016. During my last two years in LCAD, I started a game project called Planet Initium, which eventually recruited over 30 students from various colleges. Funny enough, the programming foundation I learned at Purdue actually helped kickstart my journey as a game artist/developer. I was able to write scripts to make a playable game and make all my art interactable within it. The game project got some publisher attention, though we ended up finishing it as a demo-only project, publishing it on http://itch.io (it's still there), and moving on with our lives. Fortunately, the experience I gained from working on Planet Initium became the foundation of my game developer career and eventually helped me land a job on the Diablo IV team right before I finished college.

I'm a big fan of video games and anime. My favorite game franchise is Horizon by Guerrilla Games, and my all-time favorite anime is One Piece! Come talk to me about it!

Heyo! I am Joshua C. Anderson (The C. is because there have been many Josh Andersons at Blizzard, but I am the one with the C.)

I am a Senior Props and Interactives Artist working with Blizzard for 12 years now. I am local, born and raised in SoCal in Mission Viejo. I was adventurous for a bit and left home to go to school in San Francisco. Then I got homesick for SoCal so I returned from San Francisco and landed a job here at Obsidian Entertainment, where I was promptly let go a year later because of a recession. That didn't stop me, however, as I am passionate about art and obsessively working and training. A few years later, I landed a job at Blizzard, and the rest is history.

I worked on Project Titan until it was canned and eventually became Overwatch. By then I was working on shipping StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void with many of my current co-workers, and then went on to work on Diablo IV right as it was being conceived.

Anime and early computer games were my gateway into nerdom. Akira is still basically the type of media I'm craving, and none can quite deliver. I am also kind of a Roman history geek.

I am currently living in Laguna Niguel, with my partner, 3 cockatiels, 2 finches, and a LOT of plant babies. I'm currently working on a hybrid interactive graphic novel that is taking forever but is a lot of fun, and practice drawing and painting constantly even after a long day of working in 3D. I'm recently obsessed with detailed anatomy breakdowns and have been training quite a bit.

My favorite movie is The Thing, and my favorite anime/manga is Berserk... and since I work on a lot of gore that makes a lot of sense now.

Hello, my name is Luciano Di Fede, and I`m a Senior Prop and Interactives Artist for Diablo IV.

I was born in Italy near Milan. I have always been interested in fine arts and video games, so I went to art school and later went to a university that offered specialization in 3D Digital mediums.

Before Blizzard, I worked on various projects including Forza Horizon, Payday, The Crew, God of War and Jedi: The Fallen Order. I've been at Blizzard for almost five years where I worked on a lot of pre-render cinematics as a modeler, and I've been working on Diablo for the past three years.

I`m passionate about sculpture, role-playing games, and I regularly play Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games with friends.