The Artistic Journey of a Technical Animator

Introduction

Hel­lo! I'm Ster­ling, Se­nior Tech­ni­cal An­i­ma­tor at a se­cret place. At the turn of the millennium, I started making games in my bedroom with a laptop and Game Maker 8. When my career took off in 2008, I moved into Unity, Unreal, and various other engines.

I grew up want­i­ng to be a Game De­sign­er, but back then, de­sign­ers were still most­ly ex­pect­ed to do some­thing else as well (ei­ther pro­gram­ming or art). So I fell into gameplay animation be­cause it felt like the clos­est thing to game de­sign at the time. I got my start work­ing as an An­i­ma­tor on a brows­er-based dance club game called Loud Crowd. You could send flirty, funny, or cool dances to peo­ple. They could choose to ac­cept your dance and start a chat or ig­nore it. Really fun style and a cool concept, but unfortunately, ahead of its time.

Zyn­ga bought our company soon af­ter. This was the Face­book game craze. It was in­sane working on animations and char­ac­ters that were seen by tens of mil­lions of peo­ple. I pret­ty quick­ly moved into rigging characters and taking on the whole charac­ter pipeline. I fi­nal­ly got my shot in the industry, so I took on everything I could, for bet­ter or worse.

Af­ter Facebook clamped down on games spamming Face­book feeds, Zyn­ga had some rough times. They shut­down our Boston stu­dio, but fortunately, that crew founded a new com­pa­ny, Proletariat Inc. I was the first hire at Proletariat Inc., hav­ing worked with them previously at Zyn­ga. I jumped head first into Unity and mo­bile games with World Zom­bi­na­tion. This was my first-time us­ing en­gine tools, as well as cre­at­ing VFX and animating the UI.

Getting Into Technical Animation

For the next projects, I fi­nal­ly cir­cled back to my ear­ly days of vis­ual script­ing, ex­cept in­stead of us­ing Game Mak­er, I was us­ing Blue­prints in Un­re­al. At that point, I be­came a fa­ther, and trekking into the studio for two hours a day was slow­ly drain­ing every­thing I had. Even­tu­al­ly, I part­ed ways with Pro­le­tari­at Inc. and bounced around a lot af­ter that do­ing all sorts of things, most­ly still tack­ling the whole character pipe­line. My roles had all been "Animator" at that time. It wasn't un­til one of my col­leagues' friends told me, "You know you're a Technical Animator, right?" that I even re­al­ized it was even a job. I had been tak­ing on pret­ty much the cre­ation and integration of all things mov­ing in the games I worked on, outside of the code it­self. This was 2016, essentially the start of a possible ca­reer in tech animation (as far as I know). I was con­stant­ly com­pared to An­i­ma­tors and passed over for jobs be­cause I couldn't keep up with every­thing.

It wasn't un­til 2019 that I land­ed my first of­fi­cial "Tech­ni­cal An­i­ma­tor" role at Digiman­cy En­ter­tain­ment, led by George Zi­ets. Even though I had ba­si­cal­ly been do­ing tech­ni­cal an­i­ma­tion most of my ca­reer, this was dif­fer­ent be­cause I was not an­i­mat­ing char­ac­ters, only in charge of hook­ing up as­sets to make them shine in the game. I was very un­sure of my­self. I felt like I was just medi­ocre at a lot of things, ex­act­ly what I was told not to be. However, I quick­ly learned my val­ue. We were iterating and test­ing things out a lot, and my uncanny abil­i­ty to use the en­gine tools al­lowed us to test out theories in­stead of just talking about them. Producers won­dered what I was do­ing at first, be­cause what I was doing was just chang­ing too much to track in Jira. Af­ter we hit our first mile­stone with the publisher, they were more at ease with let­ting me run loose on everything that was fall­ing through the cracks. I was the central point that connected design, art, and engineering. I didn't know everything, but I knew everything that no one else knew.

That project end­ed in cancellation despite hitting all our milestones. The publisher turned over its management, and the new peo­ple coming in just want­ed to fo­cus on fewer projects in­stead of the large slate they had. But I learned a ton from that experience about myself and my role in the industry.

I learned that I don't have to be the best at every­thing. This is a strug­gle that all cross-discipline roles deal with. Tech An­i­ma­tors/Artists/De­sign­ers are of­ten judged the same as their coun­ter­parts who might only know one spe­cif­ic area of game de­vel­op­ment. It wasn't un­til I ac­cept­ed that I don't have to be the best at every­thing that I was able to grow fur­ther into my role as a Tech­ni­cal An­i­ma­tor. Tech­ni­cal An­i­ma­tors are usual­ly ex­pect­ed to be most­ly pro­gram­mers, but more and more of them are like me, more from the animation creation side of production. More and more roles are open­ing up that require high­ly tech­ni­cal peo­ple who have an eye for an­i­ma­tion/art/de­sign that an en­gineer­ing fo­cused per­son might not. Blue­print scripting in Unreal for example has become its own full-time job at some stu­dios. Even if the Blue­print vis­ual script­ing nodes get re­placed by C++ in the end, it's still a great way to it­er­ate and find out the best way to get vi­su­als, fun, and bal­ance to your game. Games are getting so complex to work on that lots of teams need multiple people in the middle from various areas of expertise to connect all the dots on a production.

The Nuances of Being a Technical Animator

The definition of a Technical Animator varies wild­ly from studio to studio. A lot of stu­dios have their Tech Animators write tools for Animators, but some studios do not. Some studios require character rig­ging at the position and some don't. Al­most all stu­dios do re­quire the im­plemen­ta­tion of as­sets into the en­gine, and that's sort of where you can say the core of the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty lies. In or­der to do this prop­er­ly, a Technical Animator must be very good at communicating with all sides. This varies from a Technical Artist be­cause technical animation is di­rect­ly intertwined with gameplay and game design. Tech Art has a lit­tle bit of that, but tech an­i­ma­tion re­al­ly can't be sep­a­rat­ed from game de­sign most of the time be­cause of the na­ture of it. Tech animation is a con­stant it­er­a­tive process be­tween all the sides of game de­velop­ment, and the tech an­i­ma­tor is right in the mid­dle con­nect­ing them all to­geth­er.

Studios still don't seem to know how to de­scribe Technical Animator roles and tend to lump all the jobs into one big laundry list. If there hap­pen to be a couple of things on the list you aren't com­fort­able with, definitely don't be afraid to ap­ply! For Tech An­i­ma­tors, some­times skills will be list­ed just to see if you'd even be in­ter­ested in learn­ing those things. For ex­am­ple, in my lat­est role at a se­cret com­pa­ny, I al­most didn't ap­ply to at all be­cause it men­tioned tools cre­ation mul­ti­ple times, but I found out lat­er that tools development was only a bonus and not the core of what they needed.

Starting a Career

Start­ing your ca­reer is only the be­gin­ning, not the end game. You may love the job you land­ed, or you could hate it. Your life is go­ing to evolve at each step, and your job is as well. I loved every­thing about my job un­til I had kids. My life evolved, but my work did not. It took a while to recalibrate and find the right place for me again that understood my needs as a creator. It can really mess with your confidence and pas­sion. It's not un­com­mon to take a job out­side of games for a while if the right job isn't open at the time you need it. I've nev­er been more hope­ful though, as most companies I've spo­ken to now have an anti-crunch pol­i­cy and lots of par­ents are on teams these days. It looks a lot different than when I started.

If you are try­ing to get your start now, the most im­por­tant thing to do is al­ways keep improving. I see a lot of peo­ple just send out dozens and dozens of ap­plications and stop improving entirely. Al­ways split your time at least 50/50 be­tween improving and ap­ply­ing. Even if you spend 30 min­utes to an hour a night on your portfolio, that's enough. You absolutely must keep improving! I hear sto­ries of peo­ple send­ing out 500+ re­sumes, and I'm not even sure I've been qual­i­fied for 500+ jobs in my en­tire ca­reer. If your port­fo­lio doesn't feel like it match­es what the em­ploy­er is do­ing, don't sub­mit un­til you put at least one project or piece that is in line with what that com­pa­ny usu­al­ly cre­ates. Some companies will say they are open mind­ed, but when push comes to shove, they will choose the portfolio that has a clos­er-aligned experience every time. Be­ing smart about who you ap­ply to will give you much need­ed time back to keep im­prov­ing and save your sanity in the process.

Conclusion

If I were to impart any lasting ad­vice. I'd say not to force it. This job is just that, a job. Many professional game de­vel­op­ers spend their time try­ing to con­vince every­one they can make games too, but the re­al­i­ty is, there are only so many jobs to go around. My goal has al­ways been to peel back the cur­tain and al­low every­one to de­cide for themselves. I know colleagues that spent any­where from 6 to 9 to even 20 years to ob­tain this dream. You have to ask if it's worth that to you. I broke into the in­dus­try within a year, and that is on the short end. Just make sure you have a plan to keep your­self steady for mul­ti­ple years be­fore get­ting your start. The sacrifice re­quired to obtain even an en­try lev­el is not for everyone. Feel­ings of doubt will creep in from time to time (that nev­er goes away), but if you can ride out that storm and still feel good, you are on the right path. If you just aren't feel­ing it, this is not the type of ca­reer you can just pow­er through anyway. Be hon­est with your­self and con­stant­ly as­sess how you are feel­ing about your path. It's not go­ing to be easy, but it can be very re­ward­ing if you stick with it.

Sterling Reames, Senior Technical Animator

Interview conducted by Arti Burton