What do you do?
We build 3D characters and animate them for cut scenes, commercials, games, and lots of other different applications. As a senior animator, I'm in charge of a couple of other animators. This means I have some management and scheduling tasks.
I come in, I look at the schedule, I figure out what shots need to be done or what game actions need to be animated for the day. Then I get into the software ? whether that's 3D Max or Maya - and get the characters and start animating. We usually start from blocking out the poses ? start poses and end poses and any integral key poses, and work our way through putting the in-between poses and getting some motion in there.
A simple building block for animation such as a walk cycle would take about a day to create. If it was for a 'cut scene', might take two or three days even. The time taken to create actions depend on their complexity - whether they are interacting with weapons or other characters. Interaction adds an extra level of complication where you actually have to monitor intersections such as grabbing an arm of another character - you are adding a lot more technicality into the animation and having to deal with various programming constraints.
How did you get to where you are today?
My first involvement with computers was a computer-aided design course at RMIT. That was in the early 90s. I think it was pretty much the first course in Australia. From there, I started my own company and worked at that for about eight years before I decided to get more involved in animation as opposed to graphic design. I went to work at Momentum Animations where we made a lot of video clips and TV commercials. That was very animation intense and it's where I learnt to become a 3D animator. From there, I went to Torus Games. I was there for about three years where we made some Play Station 2 games, some Game Boy Advance and lots of hand-held games. From there I moved to here at Act 3.
What skills are necessary for you to do your job?
I think imagination is a big part of it. Drawing is great skill to have, but not everyone I work with know can actually draw well. They can draw to some degree, but to draw doesn't really enhance your ability to create 3D animation. It does make you a lot more useful to an employer if you have drawing skills, where you can move into doing concept art or storyboards and that kind of thing.
Generally the skills involved in animation would be an awareness of movement. It requires being very intuitive about motion and being able to convey that into the virtual world of computer character. To be able to convey the sense of weight, the sense of momentum, and even more detailed than that, being able to actually give a character emotion and feeling, especially when you are animating expressions and lip-sync.
With people who do models and textures, they use much more traditional skills to draw and sculpt, so you can pin point the skill and say 'yes well I can do this, and therefore I can model or I can texture'. With animators, it's a little bit abstract to try and pinpoint what an actual animator is.
There is an understanding of physics, but there is also another world of physics - cartoon physics. A lot of what we do in games is very reality based, with human characters running around and generally causing mayhem and shooting each other. But we also do the flip side of that using very cartooney characters with squash and stretch animation. Whilst ihe physics of that is believable, it is not necessarily realistic. So you need to be able to extrapolate your understanding in terms of physics in terms of weight and momentum into that kind of exaggerated world.
How important was your education/training?
I'm not really sure. I've worked with colleagues who have had formal training and I've worked with guys who basically learnt in the bedroom how to animate or model or texture 3D characters. I can honestly say I don't really see much difference. I know that the formally trained people generally have a much broader range of skills because they will be people that can draw that have moved into animation, or they are people that can sculpt, or they have some kind of background skill which has generally been enhanced by their study and then they moved into the field of 3D animation. Whereas the guys that are self-taught are basically 3D modelers or they are animators, or they're very honed in their skill, and they are very narrow on their focus, and they are usually very good at what they do. But they generally don't step outside of that range.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to enter the games industry?
We'd be looking for a TAFE course or some sort of further education that was basically focused on computer graphics, or if you want to be a traditional 2D animator, something that is focused on that.
If that option is not open to you or you are a mature age person wanting to get into the industry, I think the thing to do is knuckle down and put in the hours and generate a show reel that shows where your skills are.
Focus on a single skill, whether it's model building, or animation or painting, and try and not to show too much. If you are looking at a show reel for modeling and you've poorly animated a character, then suddenly you are not looking at the modeling ability any more. Or vice versa. if you're an animator and you've got a fairly poor model in there, strip it back. There are free rigs available on the internet that you can download. Strip them back and let the person watching that reel see your skills - just see the motion in your animation or see the geometry in your model.
