lordtangent

Pick a specialty. Focus on building your demo reel from day one. Game jams, student projects, whatever you work on... every project you do should be focused on making new work for your reel. It's better to do a small amount of really ambitious work than a large amount of crap. So pick your projects well and focus on excellence rather than volume of work.

EDIT: corrects typos

Thanks!

I think Kung Fu Panda is probably the project I'm most proud of. I lit nearly an entire sequence myself and the movie was really entertaining.

Also, I worked on Over the Hedge for nearly 3 years. I wasn't quite as proud of the final result on that one but what I AM proud of is the fact I actually worked in TWO departments over the course of that film (Rigging and Lighting/Comp). They only let me have one credit though :-(

We are pretty much at the point where photorealism is possible in real-time. Now it's just a matter of scaling so it's more than just a demo, but and entire game. At this point, I think the hard work to make that happen is more related to the really fine points of the craft rather than the technology per-se. By that I mean, "uncanny valley" type issues of properly preparing art assets, rigs, animation, texture, shaders, etc. Last 10% stuff. The tricky part there is that getting all those details just right amounts to a disproportionate portion of the effort needed to complete a project. The cost of AAA titles is already through the roof so I think what It's going to take to get there at a reasonable cost is mostly improvements in the authoring apps more than anything else. Perhaps more standardization would help, then there could be more asset sharing from project to project. We need to make the labor on pushing that last 10% more efficient so it's easier to do at scale.

The demo reel on Vimeo are films I worked on with my own hands. The only part of the reel that isn't 100% my own work are the people in free fall. I did a few of the shots with my own hands and supervised the rest.

When I say 100% my own work, I mean the reel represents my work as a lighter/compositor. Other people contributed to the shots in their departments. (Making work at this level is a team effort!) The reel in the link only represents my VFX work. I have an even older reel with a lot of my cartoon stuff on it here: https://vimeo.com/21271209

EDIT: typo fixes

Game stuff ALWAYS needs to be optimized. If you want to see what un-optimized assets look like, look toward feature VFX. They could learn a thing or two from the games side of the industry.

I'm a big believer in the whole Singularity idea, meaning I believe that eventually a strong general purpose AI that can fully emulate human level intelligence will be invented. However, just after that invention, everyone will be out of a job. If you are familiar with Ray Kurzweil's predictions, you know that about 20 years from now is a reasonable event horizon for such a development.

IMHO, in order to effectively automate most of the tasks required to fully replace a human operator would you would need a strong general purpose AI. I think over time we may get some narrow AI tools that will help us be better operators but at the end of the day, the human touch and eye will be required up until the point that strong AI becomes available.

All this is to say, high-level creative and artistic jobs are probably some of the most resistant to disruption by automation. Once strong general AI is finally invented tough, all bets are off though. (For everyone...Hopefully the robots don't rise up and kill us all.)

The nice thing about having strong AI make all your entertainment is it would be super easy to create nearly unlimited entertainment and it could be narrow cast to specifically the audiences who would enjoy it most. Taking that to its logical conclusion, entertainment could eventually be completely customized to an individual and produced on-demand in real-time for that single viewer.

Let's see... rare skills... I think the industry could always use more high-level developers. Basically, people with really deep STEM and CS skills can basically write their own ticket in this business. I'm talking about people who can work on renderers and write new simulation and rigging systems from scratch. I'm talking about high-level software developers who also have the esoteric specialty of computer graphics. Folks like that are exceedingly rare. This holds true for games since you'll be able to implement new tools that aren't already present in the off-the-shelf game engines. Even moving down the scale in terms of technical chops, people with computer graphics related domain specific expertise in IT and CS are somewhat rare. They are not quite the unicorns the renderer and tools programmers are but if you know how to build and maintain infrastructure for C.G. production you can build a pretty steady career compared to a production artist. (your employment is typically linked to the facility and not the project)

There are a lot of scut work type jobs people might not know exists like character finaling and paint fix and paint/roto. Character finalling is a step where the animation created by the animator is touched up to correct technical flaws in the deformation of the character. It's a hack for doing shot-by-shot fixes on the rig rather than trying to create a perfect animation rig (which is next to impossible) Sometimes the character finaler will do certain character FX tasks also, like run the hair and cloth sims. Really, for this task more than anything you need to have a good eye and an extraordinary level of patience.

Paint Fix is a special case of typical paint as seen in VFX shops. Basically, you are painting over renders to fix glitches and messed up stuff. It's not as common with the newer renderers since now that we are getting away from shadow maps and scanline rendering, the types of glitches they would fix don't happen as often. Brutally boring job. Basically, you need to have the same skills you would need for paint and roto.

Paint and roto. Most people know what roto is but they may not be aware of "paint". The paint department cleans up plates by "painting" out stuff that's not supposed to be there. The techniques they use are all over the place, up to an including painting out stuff frame by frame. The amount of clean up they need to do can be ugly sometimes. I frequently amazed at how well a good paint artist manages to do their job. The skills you need are pretty diverse since often you need to resort to advanced techniques to get the job done, like 3D camera projection. That means you not only need to know comp but also enough 3D to manage the projection setups etc. You also need a tool bag of manual tracking and paint tricks that are kind of like guild knowledge. (I mean, I never encountered some of the tricks except for professionally, when other artists would show me.) It's a tedious but important job but as the end result is super critical to how modern VFX are done. The paint and roto department is the unsung hero of modern VFX in a way, since they make the crazy plates that production turn over usable for the next stages of VFX work. Nowadays a lot of paint and roto type work is outsourced to less expensive markets but there are still domestic shops that manage to stay afloat.

One job people might not be aware of are general pipeline TDs. They are like pipeline all-rounders who do a number of tasks from ingest and publishing of plates and assets, to writing simple tools to help make production more efficient. Some of TDs specialize in fixing specific parts of the pipeline, while others have the skills to help people in every department with debugging of rigs and setups and just troubleshooting in general. The best background for a pipeline TD would be a strong generalist with a good CS or programming background.

My current passion project is a blockchain backed critter simulator called www.landrace.io It allows people to collect and breed virtual 3D pets that they literally own on a blockchain token. (Still settling on which blockchain exactly but right now we are leaning towards Ethereum or EOS) I'm really excited about this project since it mashes up two things I'm very passionate about: 3D graphics and cryptocurrency. The breeding system also has a neat feature which is nothing like anything I've ever done before which is procedural generation of creatures. I'm looking for people to help us test it when we launch. If you sign up I'll give you a free pet so you can help us test it.