“Take a complicated subject you know more about than most people, and explain it to a friend who knows nothing about it at all.”

Not that you all are dummies… I really dislike this title… but my field is a bit more involved than most people realize.

I graduated from Full Sail University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Animation in August of 2011.

Basically think of Dreamworks, Pixar, Halo, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto.

Movies and video games.

Most people don’t realize just how complicated and involved the process is to make CG stuff.

It’s not a one person team.

It’s literally hundreds of people coming together on a single project. And most of those people are specialized in one specific area for the project.

You have modelers, who make all of the things you see. Characters, the environment, cars, guns, swords. Even the pencil and stack paper sitting on a desk have to be created.

Hundreds, thousands, of objects need to be modeled. Literally, everything you ‘see’ has to be created by someone. And that falls in the realm of very specific people.

Then you have people like me. The setup artist.

A 3D model is just a really awesome statue without me. Seriously. Nothing can move unless I give it the ability to do so.

This is where my evil, world dominating tyrant side comes out.

You want your character to walk? I have to give them leg joints that bend in the right direction.

You want him to talk? I have to give him a jaw and make sure that it doesn’t affect the upper portion of his face.

Finger movement? Let me get on that so he can curl his hand into a fist for you.

I basically give everything a skeletal structure and tell the model that it is supposed to bend when a joint bends. You can check out my demo reel here if you’re interested.

Even things like a desk lamp with a bendy neck, a ceiling fan that spins, a door that can swing open… If it has the ability to move, I or someone on my team, has touched it.

Then you have the animators.

These are the people who take my work, the rig, and have it move around. Think of the rig like a marionette puppet, and the animator is the puppet master pulling the strings.

An art director normally has a storyboard or some 2D representation of what the characters should be doing in the shot, or sequence. It’s the animators job to take the 2D sketches and translate them into the 3D scene.

They’re basically kindergarteners playing with dolls. They get to have all the fun.

Then you have all of the people who do the textures.

Without these guys all of the CG elements would be this icky gray color. Nothing would be pretty, colorful, shiny, or rusted. Nothing would look like cloth, or glass, or metal. It would all look the same and be very boring.

Then there’s the people who handle lighting.

Without them the scene would be completely black and you wouldn’t be able to see anything at all. No matter how cool the textures or animations were.

These guys come in and literally turn on the lights for the CG world. They set up the sun, they set up the overhead lights in a room. They set up the street lamps, and the neon signs.

Like me, they are an unsung hero because no one things about lights when they’re watching a movie or playing a game.

You accept that you can ‘see’ the environment, just like in the real world, and that’s it. You don’t think, “Hey, that’s really awesome lighting. I bet someone worked super hard to do that.”

Or, “Wow! That’s really awesome facial deformation, I bet a setup artist spent hours weight painting to get the face to be that expressive.”

You accept it. You suspend disbelief, and accept that this could be a reality. This works like the real world, so I’ll pretend that it’s real for a little while.

After animation, there’s another facet of my area that gets to come in. Dynamics.

Things like realistic hair, cloth, muscles. Davy Jones’ tentacle face of doom. The snow systems in Frozen. The feather systems for Rio. The fur system for Sully. The motion capture facial deformation from Avatar.

All of those super crazy, high tech things, that again people don’t think about. The break throughs that push the level of realism to ever higher and higher standards.

That’s part of my area. And that comes after the base animation has been checked off. We go back in and add the physics to the world essentially.

“Hey, that character is moving really fast, so the cloth should be moving like this.”

For me, dynamics is where the fun really is. It’s a cause and effect. There is a reaction in the scene, in the character, and something else ‘should’ be behaving a certain way. And we use numbers, math, physics, to get that reaction.

We use the computer to make a believable world. And that makes something in my brain really, really happy when it comes out right.

Then you have the VFX guys. These are your pyromaniacs who found a safe outlet.

These are the guys who blow stuff up, set things on fire, have meteors crash into the ground and form craters and giant dust clouds. These are the guys to create oceans and giant waves that crash into New York City.

These are the guys who make the rain, and have glass shatter, or paint splash and splatter. Milk pour into glasses, sweat drip from foreheads. Drool run down the maw of a snarling dog.

Another level of physics. Art through math.

And those are just the main parts. There are still so many sublevels in all of those areas. So many people who have to come together to make a single master piece.

It’s a giant group effort and I love every second of it. I love being a part of it. And I love teaching other people how to love it just as much as I do.