Advice on Getting into Animation & Rigging

Introduction

Hello, my name is Carlo Sansonetti. I am a Pipeline Manager currently working at Blizzard Entertainment. I graduated from the Art Institute of California (Santa Monica) in 2003 and since then, I have had the pleasure to work on many different types of projects, from games, feature films, documentaries, VR experiences, game cinematics, and most recently the Metaverse.

I recently worked at Meta (formerly Facebook) where I supported a team of amazing tech artists. During my time there, I worked on the Avatars system and my primary responsibility was to establish processes, grow the team and help plan the work ahead.

Before Meta, I was at Blizzard and I worked as a Tech Lead in the In-Game Cinematics department. While I was there, I also had the pleasure to work with some great tech artists and engineers. At Blizzard I didn’t always work as a lead, in fact, I started as a Senior Rigger and for the first couple of years I rigged characters for almost all of the Blizzard games: WoW, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, and Diablo.  

Getting Into Animation

I first got into computer graphics when I was a teenager, and during my last year of high school, I opened a graphic design studio together with a classmate. While we worked together I watched the trailer of the first Toy Story and I was completely hooked. I started using 3D Studio for DOS, then 3D Studio Max, and when Maya first came out I learned many aspects of the software and what I really wanted to do was to become an animator. So I moved to the US and I went to school at the Art Institute of California. During my second year of school, I worked as a Generalist at Kleizer and Walczak on Scary Movie 3. That was my first professional experience and I will never forget it!

Fast forward a few years, I ended up specializing in Rigging and landed a job at Lucasfilm Animation for the Clone Wars animated TV series. I had the pleasure to lead a group of very talented riggers, most of whom I am still close friends with today.

The pace of working on that show was pretty fast since we needed to crank many rigs in a very short amount of time. Working on that show was a fantastic experience. Everybody was very talented but super humble at the same time and there was a tangible sense of wanting to create something that had never been done before. 

CGCircuit

CGCircuit is a marketplace for video tutorials that I started with a couple of friends in 2010, after leaving Lucasfilm Animation. The main goal of the company was to allow CG Artists to create a secondary income for themselves that could almost be passive and to allow people to share the knowledge with other fellow artists.

When we first released CGCircuit, we wanted it to be purely a platform that artists anywhere and with any background could use to publish and sell tutorials, but in the past couple of years, we have been producing tutorials by hiring artists and guiding them through the process of making tutorials. We have a lot of fun working with artists directly!

The Learning Process

CGCircuit is known today mostly for the high-quality tutorials on Houdini, but we also have many tutorials on other parts of the production pipeline: rigging, animation, modeling, FX, CFX (character FX), and more. 

All tutorials are organized in such a way that makes it easier for people to get the information they need quickly. Our proprietary video player allows users to bookmark sections of the videos that are important for them and this saves a lot of valuable time, especially when a user wants to rewatch a specific part of the tutorial.

I created a series of courses on Rigging and I wanted to make them very approachable. My Rigging 101 series takes aspiring riggers through the very first steps of rigging, from how to look at the geometry, to teaching them the main editors they would use in Maya, to explaining joints, IK solvers, and how to properly and predictably paint skin weights.

Then I teach a complete course on how to rig a biped character. This course builds on the knowledge a student has acquired by watching the Rigging 101 series. 

Advice for Beginners

As with anything, I recommend beginners to focus on the fundamentals and practice, practice, practice. For rigging for example I always recommend beginners who have a basic understanding of the craft to focus on quality and not quantity.

I see for example a lot of beginner demo reels that show off the rigs of a lot of characters or props, but sometimes the quality of the work itself is subpar. What I recommend is to pick one character or even one specific part of the character (for example the shoulders or the hips, or the hands) and focus on creating the best deformations possible. I would rather see a demo reel that shows only a hand that deforms completely realistically than a demo reel with 10 different characters that do not deform at quality. Different people have different focuses, but the advice is the same: focus on quality, not quantity.

What Characteristics Employers are Looking For?

I get asked this question a lot by students. What I like to say is to think of the letter “T”. This letter contains a horizontal line and a vertical line… let me explain.

Employers typically look for people who have deep knowledge of a certain subject (“vertical” knowledge) while having a broad knowledge of everything else (“horizontal” knowledge). My recommendation is to always understand the space you are in and learn as much as you can within that space, then pick a specialization (typically what you enjoy doing the most) and show your skills in that. When people do this, they don’t just successfully find a job, but they thrive afterward too!

Since I have been a rigger most of my career I will give you an example on rigging, but this can be applied to other areas. When preparing to apply for your first job as a rigger, I would recommend learning as much as possible about rigging (obviously), but also animation, modeling, scripting, texturing, VFX, and all aspects of production, especially the type of production you want to work in. You don’t need to be an expert in all these areas, but enough to understand them and understand the needs of artists or programmers who work in those areas. You can easily get that knowledge from reading articles, talking to people, etc.

When it comes to your craft (let’s continue with the rigging example), I recommend deciding for yourself what area of rigging you enjoy the most: is it rigging a character? Is it scripting? Is it painting weights? Is it rigging for games? Is it rigging for VFX? For Animation? After you pick this area to specialize in, practice it as much as possible and share your work with others to collect honest feedback and keep practicing and keep updating your demo reel with better and better work until you get your first job.

CGCircuit for Teams Program

CGCircuit for Teams is a membership program that allows teams to get access to our library of tutorials. The system allows members to purchase a minimum of 5 licenses and scale from there. Each of these licenses can be assigned to internal members of the team and can get reassigned at any time. Teams can also scale the number of licenses up and down (while keeping a minimum of 5 licenses) based on their needs.

The biggest benefit for a team is to always have access to our 250+ tutorials and watch them with no limitation. These tutorials also provide example files (project files) that can be downloaded. Our primary customers are studios and schools. Some of our clients are Cinesite, Scanline, ILM, and more. The person who makes the subscription purchase (a company representative) and the Plan Manager will have access to the Subscription Dashboard from which they can manage who within the team can access the content, here is a small demo of this dashboard.

For whoever is interested in learning more, they can read the FAQs here.

The main reason why schools subscribe to CGCircuit for Teams is that it offers a complementary learning path to their students. For example, sometimes a school with a more traditional program might lack their technical classes like rigging, FX, or procedural modeling in Houdini, etc., so having a solution like CGCircuit for Teams allows them to fill these gaps. The other common reason is to offer instructors/teachers a way to stay up-to-date with the latest industry techniques. 

Studios are constantly challenged to do more work in less time and they are also asked to always improve the quality of their work. In order to do this, CG artists have to stay up-to-date with the latest industry tricks and this is one of the main reasons why studios subscribe to CGCircuit for Teams, that way their employees can use our ever-growing library of content to keep up with the ever-evolving industry landscape. 

Future Plans

We are currently adding the ability for creators to publish Digital Assets on our platform. CGCircuit is mostly known in the industry for providing high-quality Houdini tutorials, and for this reason, we are going to focus first on building the best library of HDAs around. 

We are always looking for great artists to work with, so if anybody is interested in publishing Houdini Digital Assets on our platform, they can let us know.

Conclusion

I would recommend focusing on your primary area of specialization (read what I wrote above about the “T” concept), keep practicing, and ask people to give you honest feedback on your work. After you collect this feedback, make sure to address it and keep improving the quality of your demo reel, and don’t be afraid to remove older items from it, remember quality is way more important than quantity. 

Something else I also recommend is to network as much as possible and to make connections in the industry.

Carlo Sansonetti, Pipeline Manager at Blizzard Entertainment

Interview conducted by Theodore Nikitin