David Komorowski

Haha… he was a beast :)

I’ve spent a good portion of my career overseeing character creation. This involves work from many departments and input from even more. In the days of 2d animation, the animator was the modeler, the groomer, the rigger, the sim artist and the animator. Now we are in a place where you have different departments representing each of these things and you need them to act like a single person. Individual departments can become myopic in their view and tend to only look at their contributions to the whole. It is best (wherever possible) to bring in representatives from each dept. during each step of creation process. Make it transparent and collaborative. It helps create empathy and comradery between the depts.

The project is the ultamate end goal. Whether that be a movie, game or whatever… if the project fails, it doesn’t matter whether you had the best model, animation, groom, etc. I have found that being unbiased and transparent when it comes to conflict resolution is the best way to handle it. The conflict can usually be defused by putting it in context of the end goal. If the issue in question doesn’t help the goal, then it is not helpful (and vice versa). If you are consistent in this approach the team will respect your voice in the matter.

Troubleshooting is an important skill for any 3D professional. There are so many things that could be contributing to your issue including bad data, hardware issues, technical problems, or whatever might be plaguing your scene. When you have so many things affecting your shot, it can become overwhelming when trying to figure out what went wrong. Before you do anything, try to isolate the issue by removing variables from your scene. I usually just start removing things to eliminate them from the equation until I am left with just the components that are causing the issue.

Reference. Reference. Reference. No matter the department, or art form, reference is the key to increasing the quality of your work, honing your eye and broadening your understanding of how things really work. Often we think we understand the nature of things, but upon further study, we realize that we only had a cursory knowledge of the subject. By studying your reference, you can gain subtlety you never knew existed before.These subtleties lead directly to an increase in the quality of your work.

Often times artists will show finished shots to show off their work. This can be difficult for a reviewer because many different hands can touch a single shot. What work did you do on it? You can’t tell without context. It is best practice to either have a breakdown sheet that travels with your reel (a break down sheet lists shots and has a short description of what you did), or you can have text directly on your reel that indicates your contributions. In either case, try to be “to the point” and brief. If you are too verbose, you risk the reviewer skipping over important information if they are reviewing a lot of reels at once.