In this month’s Meet the Artist we have a talk with the talented 3D artist Daniel Zucco.
Meet Daniel Zucco

I was born and grew up in Tasmania, the beautiful island at the bottom of Australia, but moved to London 10 years ago now and I think of it as home. I always had a desire to move to Europe after my family took me on a 3-month holiday around Western Europe when I was a teenager. I was amazed by the fact that you could just jump on a plane or train and be in another country in an hour. For some perspective, the closest neighbouring country to Tasmania is a 7-hour flight.
I also loved the amount of diverse art you are exposed to when living in Europe, although MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) launched in Tasmania just after I left and is now attracting people from all over the world.
I currently live in London, which has been an incredible city to live in. It’s culturally diverse and there’s always something new to do or see. Before the pandemic, I would wander into the city every Saturday to see a one of the new, free exhibitions.
I am a 3D artist, passionate about generative design. Commercially, I work as a freelance Art Director collaborating with agencies and studios around the world, designing for global brands. My personal work on the other hand, focuses on exploring and designing generative art and pattern design which both generally influence my commercial work.
I studied Electronic Media at University of Tasmania – a degree centered around creating art with technology. For my honors project I designed an interactive film made in Flash that allowed a user to select random moving particles to construct their own edit of a prerecorded film. I think it was this project that started up my curiosity for randomness – which is now the basis of most of my work.

I tend to start most of my projects in Illustrator, working out the shapes, colours and the general rules of the piece. I often use Illustrator scripts to randomize elements of the designs. I also usually build everything on a single artboard if I’m going straight to 3D, or I’ll use multiple small artboards to design individual assets if I am going to continue developing the composition with coding software such Hype framework.
After settling on a design, I bring the Illustrator file into Cinema 4D using the Art Smart Plugin. I then use Mograph to further manipulate the design in 3D; randomizing the colours, position, rotation and scale of the individual elements. I sometimes animate the designs as I enjoy creating looped animations. I then work on light, texture and render the design in Octane.
I really enjoy designing the parameters to generate randomness and love building systems in 3D that enable me to quickly sort through 100’s of combinations of a single design. There is something about the process that seems to makes sense of the universe; being able to create simple rules that when combined make something highly complex.
My latest personal project is called “one hundred boxes”. I have designed 100 geometric designs that can be combined onto a canvas randomly. Each piece is able to rotate 90 degrees, four times, as well as move to any one of the one hundred positions on the artboard. These two rules alone mean that the amount of combinations I could make for this one piece of work would be greater than the amount of atoms in the universe, which I think is pretty cool.

I draw inspiration from lots of places but Instagram and Behance are my daily go-to for fresh inspiration. Some of my favorite artists who I follow on Instagram include Manoloide, Dimitri Cherniak, Anna Mac, PosterLad and Peter Tarka.
Instagram and Behance are my daily go-to for fresh inspiration
Looking ahead, I hope to continue exploring new ways of creating art and to make personal work more often.”
You can find me on Instagram, Behance and Esty.
https://www.instagram.com/daniel.zucco/
https://www.instagram.com/inthepatterns/
https://www.behance.net/danzucco
https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/inthepatterns
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