What do you do?
We build 3D characters and animate
them for cut scenes, commercials, games, and lots of
other different applications.
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.
Where do you see your career going?
The career path for an animator in games is a general
progression of responsibility - as
with most careers. As a junior animator you are animating
from someone (usually the lead animator or director)
else's boards or thumbnails. You then graduate to animator,
senior animator and then lead animator.
As senior animator you are fairly autonomous and are
expected to work under your own guidance according to
the lead animator and director's reqirements. You may
also be producing storyboards and layouts for junior
animators.
As lead animator you start to become removed from practical
animation and begin to deal with management of animation
tasks and schedules and liasing with the director to
determine style and content. Depending on the company
structure the next step is Art Director/Director, this
becomes much broader in terms of dealing with all art
assets and content not just animation related assets.
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. |
