[dumbo-octopus]

If you want an actual answer, you don't do it by yourself. I counted 50+ people credited. But if you want to start to play a part in doing it, basically just learn a lot of math. My gf is a technical director at a large animation studio and she got in by being an expert in linear algebra and spending a ton of time studying animation textbooks/tutorials/etc.

That said, the market is evaporating. Almost everything has moved ~to India~ [e: abroad] and there are barely any jobs left in USA, and those that do exist are being fought for by the many folks who have been recently laid off stateside. Sounds familiar...

[gamblor956]

Almost everything has moved ~to India~ [e: abroad] and there are barely any jobs left in USA, and those that do exist are being fought for by the many folks who have been recently laid off stateside.

This is simply wrong, and if anything the reverse is true: the jobs that had been outsourced to India are being brought back to the U.S. after several years of subpar work. See, for example, the most recent Marvel movies and TV shows. The abysmal VFX work was the product of outsourced VFX shops. You can bet your rear that Disney won't be repeating that mistake in the future.

[dagmx]

Your comment about the market is incredibly wrong and jingoistic. The majority of popular feature and TV animation is made outside of India.

Canada is a larger competitor to the US market than anything else, and very few companies have Indian outsourcing for feature/TV animation. Its more prevalent for VFX jobs, but even then many studios still have a large presence in North America/Europe.

Studios like wild brain, titmouse etc are all North American based, while most feature animation is a mix of North America (Pixar, Dreamworks, Disney, Sony) and Europe (Illumination, Skydance)

[dumbo-octopus]

I am sharing the lived experience of a person I am very familiar with. Do you have specific industry experience to back up your claims? If you know a place actively hiring technically minded animators, verily I say we would love to hear about it.

I know for a fact that several of the studios you list as "North American" have recently laid off almost all their animation staff in favor of Indian vendor studios. Not feature, perhaps. But TV people do work too. Or did, rather.

[dagmx]

Yes I’ve been a supervisor in both feature film and vfx at major studios, as has my partner who currently still works in the industry. I maintain close ties with several major studios and am still a well known entity in the industry. I feel like I can speak with quite a reasonable level of confidence in this space

You made two claims, that the jobs have been laid off (correct) and moved to India (incorrect). The layoffs are parts of market changes due to the strikes and production cuts before then. The implication that it was caused and will lead to outsourcing is not borne in reality for feature/tv animation.

But yes several studios are hiring still. The job fair at the recent Spark conference in Vancouver had several studios open. Feature and Tv animation hasn’t seen the slowdown that other areas of the market have and will bounce back faster.

[dumbo-octopus]

It is most certainly incorrect to claim that the jobs have not (at least in part) moved to India. It is also incorrect to claim that laid off workers are not being replaced with foreign vendor studios, largely in India. This is a 100% verifiable fact for at least one of the "North American" studios you mentioned.

It would appear you have taken your own experience, which I'm sure is vast, and made the mistake of assuming it applies to every studio. I can tell you that it does not.

I can also tell you that the job market is quite dry indeed, and that studios that were attempting to headhunt just months ago will now no longer even reply to applications.

[dagmx]

I think you're greatly overestimating how many jobs have moved to India. The largest company to do so is MPC, but for feature and TV work, it hasn't really impacted job locality.

It appears you're taking your own internal biases about India outsourcing and applying it more expansively.

I didn't say the job market isn't dry. Again, I'm pushing back on the conflation of layoffs and jobs being offshored to India. Canada and Europe are much bigger source of offshoring for the US. However that isn't to say studios aren't hiring which was what you asked about, and I answered. It's definitely a lot lower, but it's not due to outsourcing. There's so many other factors that I already mentioned (lowered production, strikes) that play in first. Animation is affected to a much smaller degree and several studios in Canada are hiring in reasonable numbers at the moment.

You can do with that info what you will, but it sounds like you don't actually want to hear an answer that contradicts your own and are doubling down on something that is not borne out of the reality of where the work is being done right now. It's especially exasperating because you're not even involved in said industry, outside of your partner, whereas I am actively every day.

Largely, the main jobs that get outsourced to India is stuff like match move and rotoscoping. There's very little Core Animation, lighting or rendering work for most of the major studios done there, with the exception of MPC

[dumbo-octopus]

Dreamworks has specifically stated that lighting and rendering work is being outsourced to India and that this was the reason for their recent laying off of their entire TV animation department (HUB). You act like somehow me directly knowing someone who was directly told this information by the people making the decision is somehow not a strong enough source? Compared to you who isn't in this country and previously stated you don't even work in the industry anymore?

[i_am_a_peasant]

I've never been hit by offshoring but I have been on the other end of it. When I lived in a relatively affordable-workforce central European country we once had to do a knowledge transfer from our Canadian office which all got laid off.

We took all their work, the whole experience was bittersweet, some of the folks there took it well others less so. But I can say that the project itself was reaching a stagnating phase where not much new work needed to be done, and we were mostly doing maintenance/bug fixing. The company itself wasn't doing anything innovative either and there wasn't leadership to put the Canadian guys skills to good use.

Eventually most of those guys were hired by Intel and all got to work on exciting new technology that none of us were qualified to do.

I think this is more or less okay when it happens, if a company does massive layoffs I take it more as a sign that they are not producing much anymore. And when many companies fire tens of thousands of people all at once I basically take it as a sign that the tech sector as a whole is taking a big downturn. Maybe things will improve when we finally stumble upon some tech that needs developing that has a great potential to be profitable and takes a lot of people to develop.

[JBits]

As someone who's keen on linear algebra but knows little about animation, how did linear algebra help her?

[dagmx]

Computer graphics is based on linear algebra. Behind the artists are lots of engineers and technical director jobs where you're building software tools, render engines or character rigs. Animation is a lovely meld of art and technology, and has been so since the very first animations existed. Its one of the reasons I really enjoy the field.

[JBits]

The application of linear algebra to rendering I can understand. Character animation less so, apart from the physics aspect.

Sounds like a nice field to work in! I didn't realise it used maths to that extent.

Would you have any recommendations for someone of a linear algebra / programming background if they were interested in this field?

[dagmx]

So one caveat I would mention is that you will likely earn more outside of the animation industry with those skills than within it.

With that out of the way, I think there are several avenues to get involved. Picking up a graphics engineering book, or learning OpenGL/Metal/DirectX will make you valuable as a realtime engineer.

But otherwise I would recommend finding an open source project and contributing to it as a way to build up the repertoire that you can use to apply for jobs with. Blender is an excellent place to start, but so are any of the projects under the academy software foundation at https://www.aswf.io

Getting more into the character animation side, you can look into Rigging, which is the process of setting up the armatures that move the characters. There are also things like simulation for cloth/hair etc...

Blender is a good place for a lot of them.

[truckerbill]

What might be a better paying area with that background?

Interesting that you say that technical art roles don’t need a reel always assumed otherwise.

[dagmx]

Anything in tech would pay significantly better with the same skills. Graphics engineers are in high demand at many major tech companies like Meta, Apple, Google.

But film/games will still pay well. Just not as well.

As for needing a role, well it depends. Tech art is a very wide role with very little definition. But also those skills apply to engineering instead of tech art as well.

Engineers don’t need reels. Tech artists would if they’re more on the art side (shaders, characters) but less so on the tools side.

[truckerbill]

You'll need a demo reel.

[dagmx]

Not for an engineering role.

[dumbo-octopus]

Helpful when writing shaders to describe surfaces and lighting, as well as working on the constraint optimization engines that go into physical body simulations.