An-Tim Nguyen on Being a VFX Artist in Game Industry

80.lv: Could you introduce yourself to our readers?

Hi, my name is An-Tim Nguyen, I live in Washington and I do visual effects for a living.

80.lv: How did you get into the industry?

When I was younger, I wasn't allowed to play a lot of video games, so I found ways to do it anyways. At the time, a lot of MMOs were exploding, there were a lot of public beta tests and such. For me, it meant that I could just download games and play for free and jump from game to game every month. After playing a bunch of games, you build a lot of opinions, go on forums, and start learning how to modify and build things. It was not as accessible as Roblox or Minecraft, but it was one of those areas where you're trying to learn how to build pieces of games.

When I realized that this is a fun way to learn how to do those beautiful things, I tried to go to school for that. At the time I was living in France and I told myself: "Hey, I'm gonna go to the US and learn video games." I ended up at the Art Institute, it was a massive for-profit school with subsidiaries in different cities and states. Eventually, it got sued by the government for defrauding students, they made false claims here and there about their success rate and such.

When I went to that school, I ran into a lot of other people who also wanted to make games, who had all these different resources, who were watching tutorials or trying to learn things from different teachers, who may or may not have had game industry experience. But importantly, the school was in Southern California where you had a lot of different companies with a lot of people I could network with; there was Blizzard, Obsidian, inXile, and others. Talking to these professionals, understanding what was important from their perspective, and trying to decide on what you need to work on; you start piecing together your program, your own type of thing. And the community was helping: if someone got a job at a big company, they'd try to help you out. Doing that support network and learning, I went in there scrappily in that sense. 

My early career was working in corporate VR, before Oculus where they had actual working screens for your eyes. We were doing what was called a cave system: when you had projector screens in the room lit from behind and you had to wear 3D glasses with a tracker on them, and the entire image was moving around you. While I was working in that field, it wasn't super high graphics, but I got the experience and tried to leapfrog into actual games because for me entertainment was more interesting than building these really expensive projects for clients that most people would never see.

My real first opportunity to work in games wasn't with AAA, I started working in indie and just clawed my way up this ladder from Unreal forums, where they were looking for very cheap workers, trying to get in there. So I built experiences on some early Steam games, one of them was called Primal Carnage, it was a dinosaur game. This was before ARK: Survival Evolved became a huge thing, it was a small Team Fortress-like type of game on a ridiculously small budget. I worked on some really big flops. One of them was a game called Rekoil, it was a 30 on Metacritic; they tried competing against Counter-Strike.

My first real shot at AAA was at 343 Industries, where I got to work on Halo 5, but I wasn't even really making art, I was conditioning or integrating art from outsourcing, where there were always a lot of opportunities there because they want to be able to give newbies a chance to do things and there is also a lot less risk of making art that isn’t usable. So I built a lot of technical know-how and knowledge not only from studying but also from getting to that point in life.

Eventually, I got a full-time art job at Bungie, I was a 3D generalist on the launch of Destiny 2, and I worked there for a while. I went from being a 3D generalist doing a lot of prototyping, 3D modeling, trying to get some game logic in there, rigging and animation, to honing more and more towards visual effects, which is my current specialty. It's not only just particle systems. It's also lighting, camera, sometimes a little bit of controller rumble, animation, and piping different variables and values to trigger gameplay logic. So having broad knowledge and all these things I had to learn from scratch was really satisfying. I worked on a lot of big launches at Bungie at the time.

Then I had an opportunity to become a VFX Lead at Counterplay Games for over a year. I had a really good experience there, they gave me a ton of freedom. They said: "Hey, you're going to be VFX artist number one that we hired internally for the team; you’re going to build the effects team from scratch." So I was able to hire four additional people, and we were able to do a lot of good work. Then some layoffs happened; they have a much smaller team now, but I also got hit.

So I got into games and I kind of bounced around trying to figure out my way through, all the way to where I'm at now.

80.lv: You traveled all over the world and ended up in Washington. I think getting exposure to different places is such a cool experience. In Southern California, there are a lot of people here who make games, and most of them are from different countries. It's an amazing melting pot of cultures if you're in the game industry.

I'd say yes and no. Yes, we do have the opportunity to import talents from different places around the world, but there are still diversity issues when it comes to games. The majority of people working in the industry are guys. There are probably 20% of women if I'm just estimating, and the USA itself is more largely represented than other countries. And it's not like women are worse at games, they just haven't had that opportunity historically. I feel like in the past, there were a lot more equal opportunities in terms of programming, and then somehow, towards the 80s-90s, those shifted. But now, we're trying to give more opportunities to people where people of color haven’t had them – there aren't a lot of people who are brown or black in games. Things are getting a little bit better in terms of opportunities but there's still a lot of work to be done in that sense. If you're able to find really good people all across the board who can do this stuff, then that's success.

80.lv: What would your advice be for people who are just starting out but want to try new things, move to the USA or another country, and work for big companies like Bungie or 343 Industries? How do you get into an AAA place like this? And do you even want to go there? Maybe you want to find a smaller space to start?

If you have an opportunity to work at different places, know that no job exists forever. If you embrace the ability to have a variety of experiences, then it gives you more information later. It only gives you more freedom to make your choices, use your experiences, leverage them for good, and help people out. So when considering large companies, just look at it through the lens of having an opportunity to try something and then make your judgments from there later.

Obviously, there can be a lot of constraints, maybe you can't go to some country because you have strong restrictions or issues moving around, or you need to be close to your parents. But if you have the opportunity, go for it. Of course, there are also some risks involved, so if you can, just ask people, "Is it going to be hard for me to adapt there? To speak that language? To find food or enjoy the weather?" Even moving from California to Washington, there are a lot of people who have issues with the weather, so it's something to consider.

80.lv: There are a lot of introverts in the industry, and meeting people can be difficult, but this is going to bring you your job security in the long run. How do you start talking to people? 

I think the most generic advice I can give is when you have a challenge and you don't know how to do it, look for help, look for other introverts. Look around the room and see, "Hey, another person is looking uncomfortable. How can I connect to that person?" Maybe you have something in common, maybe you like Star Wars or have something you can discuss. Like, "Hey, do you know anyone in this room?" Just find this common ground and work from there, then it's like muscle memory.

A lot of people don't realize that I'm actually an introvert in a sense. I've been practicing my social skills so hard for so long that I come off as a functional extrovert every now and then because I know how to operate and how to communicate with those people. But that doesn't come naturally, especially when you're young. Over time, if you have the need or will to survive within a network situation, you just have to try. Maybe you'll fail every now and then, but try to ask for help. Just like with building any sort of skill, being able to like to communicate and be social is important because it's not just for networking but also for communicating internally. If you're working in an area where you need to think about empathy, player experience, or empathy for your co-workers, you being able to connect is going to be the most important skill, especially in gamedev because you're working with people.

80.lv: What is it like to be a technical artist? What does it mean in today's market?

In my opinion, the definition of tech artist is such a blanket statement, it can really encompass anyone. It could be extremely engineering-driven or extremely art-driven because in a studio structure when you have different areas of responsibility given to people of different job titles, you'll have an artist that has a bunch of different responsibilities. And any task that's not related to that area, any gap between all these responsibilities ends up being tech art or tech design.

If you look at different generations of gamedev, you'll see, for example, 3D modeling used to be tech art because the artist was the person drawing ideas, and then someone had to go to Maya and push vertices around to build the thing. That used to be tech art, and then suddenly shaders became tech art until you had people who could make textures. Now they are texture artists. Rigging was tech art, but now we talk about rigging artists. We have VFX artists, they build shaders, write code to be able to push vertices around. It's because there's now a known process, which then becomes art rather than just tech art.

So it is extremely difficult to say what a tech artist is. Even when you go to GDC, to the Round Table for tech artists, they don't all agree on what they do. Some people literally open up Excel spreadsheets and look at the memory dump data and go: "All right, we're gonna optimize these numbers". Some people say tech art is as valid as when you're plugging nodes together, and that's tech art. And then you have some saying you have to be able to script or you're not a tech artist. I've built a career in tech art but I never had to script because some tools are mature and some are not. Maybe there's little reason to build those pipelines because they want to have more flexibility to do things.

So there's really no answer. Maybe tech art is defined by project constraints, how large it is, what the target is, and the level of complexity that has not been accounted for until someone has the genius idea of building a tool, a process, or documentation for it.

80.lv: What are your thoughts on the tech art tools available now?

The beauty and horror of code are that it can be built in any kind of given architecture and on assumptions of how you build stuff. So there is no generalized specific path to doing it. There are some general concepts, but if you're starting out and you have no idea what to do, grab what's free – Unreal Engine, Unity, YouTube tutorials, documentation – and stick to small goals. Build things or mod existing toolsets or games. So if you don't want to build an entire game system, if you want to be able to just modify things, know how to bake a texture out or add a model to something.

You can mod a game like Fallout and put your own clothes there, download the Fortnite editor to build your own houses, or build maps for Counter-Strike. There are different things that you can use to learn processes or policies. For example, in a shooter a line of sight is super important, so maybe you need to build cover, alcoves, or choke points. You start discovering these things when you try testing.

For JangaFX EmberGen or Houdini, if you have the ability to play around and see if you can build something within that engine, do that. If there's a hurdle or you don't have the resources to learn, maybe it's a detour; maybe it's important for movie production or automotive rendering, but you have to realize that you're making games. Like with Photoshop: sometimes you can use it to make textures and build games, but learning Photoshop is its own industry different from just building stuff for games.

So try things and build stuff because you get actual experiences from there. If you work at a big company, they're going to teach you how to use this and that, but you can still understand mental concepts by saying, "Oh, we actually pack textures this way." If you're familiar with this frame of reference, you can see, "This is how we do it differently," or "We're using models in a different manner" because you have this understanding, the same point of reference of what you're doing.

So just pick something, try, and have something worthwhile to test out. Talk about stuff and ask for help along the way.

80.lv: So games are still a very technical process, but I can't leave the issue of AI untouched. What's your take on it, especially in 3D production?

There are going to be a lot of different areas where we have to figure out things like the ethical use of AI, if you should be able to use broad data sets, whether we have permission or not. These things are going to be figured out in court. Once it's done, the technology of AI itself, whether you have the right to own the generated assets, it's all going to be there, it's inevitable. In this case, the argument ends up being where it is best used and if it is valuable to use that.

If we need to populate a scene with a lot of assets because the value of the project depends on this and we find that using AI is more useful than going around the world and scanning things, then it's valuable. But if we are at the point where there are so many games, open worlds, universes, and props... Humans are really good at being bored of stuff, and sometimes the level of good enough ends up not being good enough. What's that gap between what humans want and what we're able to provide? 

10-20 years ago, when people were trying to make more and more realistic stuff, we all thought everything was going to be like in movies. But there's still space for handcrafted art. AI might be better at stuff like that, but there is still this idea that if a human touched it, if it looks like a different style, then it is still more valuable or more different because of rarity. Or more different because they can make a cool documentary about how they built it. People like that storytelling, people like to gravitate towards that value, that rarity of human touch. So maybe humans won't really disappear from the equation because we want to have that random thing that's making it a little bit different.

We don't really know what's going to happen in the long term, but in the short term, there are definitely going to be movements in terms of people more or less specialized in different processes. But if we look at places like Hollywood, for example, where they had a lot of innovation to reduce cost, the answer is always to make crazier movies out of that. 300 was a huge innovation at a time, they had a lot of cost reductions. They were able to do that, and you wondered, what if you could do more out of this process?

Maybe there's an infinite appetite. We haven't reached that point yet, but even if we did have an appetite, maybe we would just get bored of eating the same food, and it would force us to try things differently. So maybe there is no limit yet that that we know of in the next 10 years.

Just looking at my family members, who sell Swiss watches in Vietnam, I think the watch industry has a lot of parallels in terms of how games are made or what people care about when they see watches and how they see games. For a watch, it's both an extreme technical endeavor and a very artistic endeavor in trying to meld these things together. But ultimately, a watch is something people are building out of purely emotional reasons. If we're talking about a manual watch, it's completely obsolete by anyone's standards. Quartz crystals are cheaper, better, and more accurate, and nuclear clocks tell you the exact time. So why do we want a watch to have springs to tell the time?

The capacity of humans to want and care about very specific things is almost arbitrary. Maybe there's a logic to it but it's a very empirical thing. We just have to try something out to know what we want out of it. So maybe there is a very objective metric about something, like this thing's better, it's faster, more accurate, but humans don't care about that. They're not rational people. They like what they like and you're buying entertainment. And sometimes the ridiculous broken thing is what they really like.

80.lv: If you were to introduce people to watches, what are the three pieces you would show?

I'd show the watches at three different price points, made with different types of technology to help them understand and appreciate why people want to spend a lot of money on different things. I have this watch to tell the time and another, which is so interesting that I could pass it down to my children. I would have this watch that you could look at with a magnifying glass and see every hand-polished thing that you'd have to figure out. Those things that walk you through the storytelling, the manufacturing processes I think are the most interesting to explain to someone who has no idea how watches work.

80.lv: What's your favorite game of all time?

Maybe Shadow of the Colossus. I feel like it really cemented its own genre. Killing bosses back to back but also having this weird emptiness, this haunting feeling –there was nothing really like it. Maybe that's just me being old-school but I like games that do that teaching, where you don't have to answer everything, they don't have to feed you every single thing. You just interpret it, and interpreting is art.

80.lv: Is there a game you like that hasn't had its spotlight yet? A very good game that you want more people to learn about?

For a while before people started covering the game, it was Spec Ops: The Line. It is probably more of an academic study at this point, but when it was released, people thought it was another war game like Call of Duty. But it is this weird commentary about war and violence, it has a lot of parallels to games and gamers and it started critiquing the experience of playing games. If you have an opportunity, play it. Some of the mechanics are old where you're shooting red barrels, but Spec Ops: The Line is a pretty good recommendation from a very academic standpoint.

80.lv: What do your parents think about your career? Do you have to explain games to them? Are they happy that you're in the industry?

At first, they didn't understand what I was doing. When I started my portfolio, they said, "Oh, he makes images on the screen." Over time, when I said I was moving away from home, I was able to pay for things, and after I gave them the tour of the studio, they started talking to people, trying to understand the impact of things. At some point, games became not just something you do to escape, and my dad asked me, "Hey, have you heard about this game called Fortnite?"

I don't think they have a very strong concept of "Do humans actually need to play games?" This desire and urge to share communities. But I do try to explain it to them in very simple terms. My dad likes golf, for example, and he goes to play with his friends. So I tell him that sometimes playing a game like Destiny is us on our computers playing golf with our friends. That's all that it is. And he understands that in those terms. I think he understands what I'm doing on a very emotional level but not necessarily on a technical one.

An-Tim Nguyen, VFX Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev