The First Day Of The Rest Of My Life

Today was my first day at Image Metrics as an officially employed character animator.

Image Metrics does advanced facial animation for film and video games, most notably they've done almost all of the games made by Rockstar. (Grand Theft Auto Series, Bully, The Warriors, etc.) It's exciting to be working on well-known titles that I know people will actually play, so now when it's finished I can show you what I did. =)

My day started with paperwork in the front office, then I went in for the animation dailies where I finally got to see first hand the caliber of animators I'd be working with. It was really neat to see all the different facial rigs for the games, and to see what they were and were not capable of. For the film work the rigs are extremely detailed and the animation is the same, where as the game rigs have a lot more limitations and the animation can't be as complex. After dailies they got me set up with a computer and I got started on my first shot.

My first obstacle was that the scene files for the game I'm on are all in 3D Studio Max. For those who don't know, there are a few different programs you can use to animate in and they all sort of do the same thing but have different buttons and ways of doing them. So in theory if you know the core principles of animation then you can animate on any software, but there is still the hump of learning the buttons. Took me about half the day before I felt like I was doing anything productive. Still though, to learn a new 3d application in half a day made me feel smRt.

After I got it (pretty much) figured out I was able to start workin' on the shot. We do all facial animation, so I have to polish this one long sequence of facial work on the shot I'm given. My current shot is 3641 frames long, which is....a lot! There is a lot of time where he isn't speaking since someone is talking to him, so that's a nice save at least. It's great though, my first professional shot. I'll remember this forever.

Spent the rest of the day working on that and around 3pm we had a studio meeting with one of our guys talking about FACS (Facial Action Coding System) this crazy system that Pyschologists use to analyze facial expressions. Neat stuff! I continued working on the shot until about 6:30pm and realized I forgot to take a lunch break and was starving, so I picked up and headed home.

It's so awesome. So, so, so awesome. Finally.

Here is my list of thanks to people who have helped me:

Emily Grossman
Ken Robkin
Dan Edwards
Karna Nelson
Sean Cannon
Cedric Busse
Kevin Scott
Randy Haycock
Sean Ermey
Martin Hopkins
Dave Vallone
Mike Bahurinsky
Alexiss Memmott
Rich Fournier
Mike Wong
Bobby, Sean, and Carlos for starting AnimationMentor.com!
Tyson, Cam and all the guys and gals at SimplyCG.net
My Parents
Everyone at AM

I hope I didn't forget anyone but seriously everyone has helped me so much I could never have learned how to do all this stuff without the support of so many good people. Thanks to you all. =)

Man it feels so good for a dream to start to form into something real.