Riot Games: A Day in the Life of an Artist

hello everybody thanks for coming out tonight and battling la traffic to get here yeah real thanks for joining us today at the Lenovo stage at gnomon School in Hollywood for our event Riot Games a day in the life of an artist my name is Dan Johnson and I'm the associate director of placement and alumni relations here at gnomon and it's with great honor that I'll be hosting our guests tonight but before I introduce them a couple of things tonight's event is sponsored by Lenovo so thank you as always to Lenovo for helping us bring these free educational events to you from the gnomon campus today's live demo and presentation is powered by Lenovo and Intel technology which our students also use here on campus and another special thanks go out to our industry friends and partners and appreciate Wacom for the awesome support if you need to leave the stage at any point please help us by keeping noise to a minimum so thank you in advance for your help with that our staff outside can give you directions to the nearest restrooms or anything else you may need and with all that said I'd like to now introduce our guests from Riot Games our first guest is Jim Lynn she's the creator behind several popular champions for the game such as Nami her first champion and our personal favorite Kiana Evelyn Gally oh and I relia she has also designed skins or costumes for many champions Jim has a BS and entertainment design from Pasadena Art Center College of Design prior to joining Riot Games about eight years ago she freelance for many video games and animation studios so let's give a huge welcome to Jim Lynn concept art lead for Riot Games come on let's give it up thank you so much our next guest is Jason geezer he's been working in entertainment for over 12 years and has been making visual effects for Riot Games for the past six during his time at the studio he's given a hand to various teams including League of Legends and others he is passionate he's a passionate educator and involved leadership figure in the worldwide real-time VFX community when Jason isn't making sparkles and explosions at work he enjoys hanging out with his family in their LA suburban home so let's give a huge welcome to Jason geezer senior VFX artist for Riot Games our next guest is Lana Basinski she's responsible for bringing characters in League of Legends to life through movement relatively new to Riot Games her most notable work includes animation on Blizzard Entertainment's heroes of the storm Starcraft 2 heart of the swarm and getting timed out for using too much caps-lock and twitch chat beyond her daily work as an animator Lana is a summit advisor for G DC's animation bootcamp co-founder of teatime animation a staff contributor to animation exchange and a yo-yo aficionado so let's give a huge welcome to Lana Basinski senior animator for Riot Games [Applause] and let's give a huge welcome to all of the riot team right now as they do their presentation thanks so much [Applause] all right tonight's agenda see I go first character animations next animation plus we'll make sure we'll have more time for a Q&A for everyone all right so concept art what's a life of concept park in an actual video game you don't actually just like go on your seat and you know just draw but you have to work with your cost disciplines what does cross disciplines mean basically there are non artists that are but they actually involve with your like expertise to make this character alive so this triangle right here is actually the very major diagram how to make a champion art actually that's what represents concept art game design or they actually design abilities basically the video game itself narrative is the one that actually gives life emotions to character where they have voices and scripts so take off game design if it's just art or narrative it just felt like what a just like yeah our demo reel just giving like you know just game design without like art it's just gonna be like I don't know maybe proxy models or stolen assets narrative is basically like yes what you're just reading a book or reading like a script but with the whole thing we were able to create a champion so let's actually go on one example of a champion and usually we have mission statements with three pillars that actually this describes a champion mission statement means like Oh does this like the overall summary of this champion what is it gonna be about I'll just read it after trying to kill a mysterious and feared monster to prove he was a hero nunu instead found a best friend Willem together they snowball wildly across the Freljord helping people wherever they go and living out their imaginations unaware of the danger on their heels and the true power in their hands so like the reason why we have three pillars right here this is one of the things that we always have to align with our cross disciplines because none of them knows how to draw and none of them actually speaks usually an art terminology so we this is our common ground how to communicate each other so basically the three important pillars for this character is like one is frost behemoth mainly I think this is one a visual side pillar unlikely brothers on an adventure that's 40 narrative playful fantastical snow magic that's a pillar for the gameplay and all three of this plus the mission statement well actually create a champion as like a complete summary obviously like we do explorations and these are done by just in Alvers Chris Campbell and some of mine right here too so we actually do arc jams like hey what do you think about what the frost behemoths look like because you know can't always have a Yeti because Yeti is not I'd be protected kind of thing so we all have to like come up with it and as you can see there's like just different personalities like well I think a frost behemot should be you know you know like very tribal and like fluffy hair and all that stuff well for me I want like well I want like a little bit of that dr. Seuss feel or stuff or like something that's really fluffy and you can actually already know that our personalities here and some of them are like really huge horns that's gonna RAM at you so yeah you're gonna have a range of like ideas based on like the statement that we have next one is like even more ideas this is actually by Chris and Justin they continued while I venture to a different project so yeah interesting shapes there's even I've like a frost Behaim it's actually a dinosaur I guess and there's like a Stegosaurus right there is pretty pretty pretty neat and there's like a puff ball like they all express their different ideas lots of different ideas and there's even more ideas like one of the things that we wanted to also explore is like okay we're done maybe we're gonna take a break from silhouettes let's actually try exploring what they do in the game mainly by you know draw them in action what does it look like when he rolls a snowball does he kick the snowball or grabs the snowball or they just slide down like a penguin Oh like just a couple ideas right there next iteration will be like okay we're trying to hone down I think like we like the horns and there's something about the fluffy animal rather than the dinosaur let's actually continue on that one it's like yeah inhaling a snowman push more snowballs and I guess more sliding I if they like it we draw more of that and finally of course we should not forget his little human partner nunu needs some explorations as well that's actually how that little Yeti turned out to be if you guys noticed like the color palette still stays the same because like we need to make sure these characters are recognizable forgot to mention that we're reworking an old character make sure they're up to date and of course not just a Yeti in a Google you know like it's like a frost behemoth oh I did not know that there's more explorations about this the UH frost behemoth I guess like yeah maybe like more shapes what if like the horns are like frozen what if his ears are frozen what if he says hi with the horn in the middle and what if he has ballooned antennas like I guess and like I owe those little cute little wings right there I've got to push that idea and finally we hear were we landed word this is how nunu and Willam looks like and some little bit of snippets how what would they do in the game pushing some snowballs having fun inhaling some snow and killing some razor beaks right there another example I want to next is yes Evelyn so basically I'm just gonna give her like a really quick rundown she's basically our succubus in a game and basically she likes to like you know kill you slowly it's almost like when you have a favorite food you can't just like you know gobble it up or else I'm not savoring it properly so she kills people slowly because that's her height of happiness shadow stalker for her gameplay is basically like yeah she goes in shadows you can't see her and finally if she pops in your face she'll rip your face apart so yeah basically you're dead or you're gonna die slowly so I got so excited about this one because like oh my god shadow and Evelyn like succubus cuz like there's so many things I can play with like cuz shadows is so formless I can just like go with like oh maybe she had so many on worms oh my god like her could be so long or her hair can stop things or she has like really nice clothing or even like she's you know she has like three eyes on the side but suddenly it disappears because it's in shadow and maybe like her who can be a path or whatever right so just so many things that I wanted to express like power source in shadows that kills you so next thing is like but I got like so much feedback from my cost discipline that was like they told me you do forget that this character is an assassin right it was like yeah alright and then they were like yeah but your stuff yeah while ago I know it's cool and it's a lot but they just all look like mages to me and it was like ha why later like I spent so much time like researching and like you know all my mood boards and they're very creative right it's like yeah but doesn't read assassin you know I was like so I have to remove a lot of pieces try to slim it down until it reads assassins I damnit like old cool stuff and goes nothing like I wish they're all here like like every other like you know concept artist was like why did they always pick that things that are not exciting so like yeah I still try to put some shadows so maybe less there's some more arms but less and also shadows but a lot more toned down and I and they say and then when I went back was like they they're not feeling it but there's like maybe just one in the middle I don't know because she's so imposing whatever and then I actually come up with these were like oh what if like her she's like you know her clothing actually changes and then it's made out of shadow and all that and was like yeah but you went back and starts to look like a mage again because all these stuff is like you know very major it was like okay all right I'll try to like get better at this and then of course we're the love of like creativity they didn't like it whatever so I end up with girl right here looks like all right no more flowy no more flowy things cuz every time when I put flowy things they felt like it's a mage it's like I guess flowy thinks is a mage like so I strip all the shapes down back to like more sleekness and only I chose like two major things that she uses to kill people which is I don't know I just call her tendrils maybe because I just want something flowy from her because she's she's very she's very feminine and she's she's like a succubus as well so might as well put something right there and then was like maybe like you don't want it to blue and that looks like smurfy and you know this one looks like a dead maybe a combination of all of it those like okay before after that I just like again like taking a break it's nice because what makes a champion or I mean sorry pitching a champion doesn't mean like you just have one rendered image it's good to also couple with image the things that she actually does because yeah that's what our videogame characters do is not just stand there looking pretty or cool they do things so this one they felt like oh now actually they're seeing some assassins qualities here were like grabbing a guy stabbing a bat slashing someone in face or using the tendrils to poke someone and all that stuff or like this's could be like her shadow for him whenever she turns invisible she looks like the shadow apparition right there so this is where we end up Evelyn as as you can see trying to making her assassin and it's like a really long journey for me as a like concept artists and like getting precious - your work tends to be like exhausting as well but it's as long as it's not ending up like following the goals you still have to like okay let it go you know it's all about it's all about the product goal it's not there nothing personal because like it's not only a concept artists is making this character again there's like you have cross disciplines game designers narrative that has to go with this so just another just another character that I want to show off because I really love this I really loved this artist share her name is anya nick Innova you guys are really familiar with her you got to look her up she's really really cool so she's actually doing recon and for me like like sure final product but these are really cool to me because like when I first saw her work it's like oh my god like this also changes not just like concept art but there's like a merge of a merge of animation pitch in it because everything about how she drew a character there's always an attitude it's not about like silhouettes of like shapes because usually like concept parts like oh cool shape you know shape variation shape ideas but she was able to make shapes out of like the characters posture attitude and also like the you know emotional emotional flow of how the character how she wanted to portray the character how the character moves sorry and there's more did some masks cool but I like this guy right here it's just some cool motion to show very very expressive that's why I really love about this cuz like it's a character but it's already in motion you can actually by just looking at it you can already feel like the movement some more you know cool variation like even like pitching like how this and that I mean works was like geez I mean that's really elaborate smart cool things to dive deep into it's very expressive you can also you can already feel the movement love the distortion even this one good use of like value look at this you dare even this one's cool too so yeah even more like so just talking through like these things actually would instead of just like a fully rendered character or a really cool drawing these actually are the ones are very important to like your cross-discipline so they can now visualize how this character works because sometimes like usually game designers when they try to like design a kit they just use like you know temporary art we call it temp art they just borrowed existing assets and then it was like and it's like just you know very mechanical like they're they're just like expressing okay this line of skill-shot goes that way and splits like that but it's super like mathematical like boring and it's not even it's not even designed for the character yet they're just like putting it for the sake of mechanics without the thematic yet but these will actually help them was like oh I can push this ability further to make it look more like this and it amplifies their ideas with their gameplay yeah cool like that one of another things that I like about Anya is like she starts to like do expression studies and now this actually helps for narrative what type of like actors or like yeah attitude that they can push the character more like this is how we actually bounce back and forth with our cross disciplines II just like that kind of final record oh and this is aya she actually did some like facial explorations for her too it's really nice how to like communicate to someone that's not artist you were able to reach they're more like the emotional resonance through drawing because how can you explain all these through words it's gonna be and it's gonna be hard I guess some like it's a view of them two of them together cuz we release them as a pair they're actually lovers there are lovers they're not it's not a secret [Laughter] right so some like lessons were learned like remember old the the snow behemoth and all the like the shadow Evelyn stuff it tends to be exhausting because I imagine like this is not your only project you're gonna have to move to the next one and you cannot do the same thing again it's just you know you you feel basically you feel burnout through like endless spinning of ideas it's it's just an sustainable as an as an artist that you have to keep creating every time like you still need to conserve energy because there's gonna be more characters there's gonna be more champions people want more so just wanted to like try to be efficient with both of your ideas in energy communicating with our cross disciplines about the process effectively like how can we tell if concept is almost done because this this time that part were like I have a producer was like so he talked to me and he said like you know that new new snow behemoth right like is how do we know if it's almost done because every time we see a past there's even more and more drawings are we still lost or we found our Frost behemoth yet or was it is it gonna be a dinosaur so that that's also a problem because like usually non artists they don't know what does it like the stage of work in progress compared to some artists of course most of us we know like oh it's not render yet but for them it's like there's colored or shadow so it's rendered you know so for them it's like yeah we're still having a hard time to tell what stage you guys are at and this will actually going to clash our scheduling because they need to schedule things properly so we release the champion in the right time you know all of these can't go forever it can't spin forever next one is like managing themes properly by okay knowing the specific goals what to hit like remember what I did for Anna Evelyn I was like I'll go crazy with that shadow magic I was like I should have put it's a shadow magic on the assassin so I already could have hone it down and not you know grieving over like but I did this work throw it away they're good ideas to avoid that we got a keep in mind reminding ourselves what is the North Star of this product so the there are some specific goals that you wanted to know as well that's very important like type of audience yes of course like we gotta know what type of audience you wanted to hit like for a type of audience we always ask like Oh target a type of audience that you wanted to resonate with this character so some people like okay let's let's try to target the the people who like snitch ideas were like yeah the one that doesn't like you know hot ladies and hot guys they want like creatures like cool creatures because cool creatures is actually considered nice okay so now we don't have to explore the hot characters we can just focus on making a coolest coolest creatures for these niche audience right one thing that's really important because like this actually tells us the functionality of the character is game play opportunity space what does that mean some people like to play characters that that's more priestly which is heels and some people like to play as a warrior or some people play less assassin so identifying those characters it's like oh is it gonna be a tank warrior I mean tank assassin or a mage so at least I don't have to do a mage on an assassin character save all that time and energy the narrative space can be really important because again like we want it to be IP protected and it's it's good to like yeah it's just good so like it characters gets really memorable and not just like I'm just gonna Google yet it was like oh I'll just take that one or grate some stuff like that I want to make sure like it expands like our world of IP of League of Legends as well which is it's very helpful in our narrative side so speaking off like taking all these notes and let's actually do another round of a new champion another good example so this is how it looks like when we have a product goal that was outlined artists don't usually don't do this but usually with this goals were handed over from like our project manager so product goals we want to know we want to have a broadly appealing top lane juggernaut what does that mean if you play League of Legends it's basically that Lane on the top you know the look that lonely lane on the top we need something right there but broadly appealing like it's a word targeting broad audience when they say a broad audience so like I don't want to say this because like I mean it's it's a character not for artists the reason why it's character not for artists is because like we have a broad audience age of audience that ranges from you know like teenager to like 30s right late 30s maybe there's there someone that's playing 40s I don't know whichever like so we we have that broad audience and we want to make sure we we make sure everyone like around the audience likes it rather than like someone that's like nah no I'm I'm an exquisite like you know player and I like to do things that are unconventional or like I like very like exquisite taste I don't go with the I don't go with the like you know the maintenance broadly appealing right there but usually they're the hot guys and hot girls hello complexity means like his gameplay is very easy to pick up you don't play a league it's not very complicated you press this and then the character does something and you win the game it's that easy to use deliver the fantasy of a grappler that fights with his bare hand so it's like oh okay so this is the this is the gameplay that day once I can just their bare hands okay that's that could be a challenge because like usually yeah rodney appealing is usually like human characters cuz everyone can relate to a human character and with the bare hands that means like I don't have a unique I don't know silhouette to lean on because it doesn't have a weapon that's another challenge right there alright target audience top lane juggernaut or bruiser players that just like to smash their opponent in lane so it's it's that simple very very like direct rate like easy to pick up very simples like okay jeez okay these are just the examples of the characters that exist in gameplay were like oh they like to play these characters where this is target players the players will like these but they should like the sky - okay people that like grappling thematics like Zangief and Alex from Street Fighter or Potemkin and iron teacher from axis games the time chemins I think is from guilty gear yeah it is from guilty gear so again we have like a range of examples so it actually communicates not only artists but these are also good referenced who like to make alignment with different cross disciplines all right where we did we end up so this is actually the final final mission statement for that champion but let's actually work one in a reverse way he wasn't a mob boss he wasn't vestroia is usually like our human animals or like humans with ears or whatever human with ears hurts and some stuff we did we usually like complete this page as we go on from like the Eider visual idea it's usually visual idea sorry okay so instead of all that twenty or twenty silhouettes or twenty explorations that I did I did for and not only just for but I gave them every single one has a strong the mattock not all of your plays League of Legends so I'm just gonna translate it in a very lame and Stern so spaceman wait for arms robot Butler gangster beast guy and wrestling dinosaurs so like Eric all of these actually communicates simple toppling but then they say like no they're not broadly appealing because I don't think this dinosaur appeals to everyone's like that you I like it but anyways um yes I gave them this bread quality spread with with a goal in mind and also a different dimeric that I could actually pair with which is actually when I show it to like the leaders I felt like oh yeah I get it actually it is cool like every every single of these we can already make it as a character but we need to stick to our goals you know so like we stick to this guy right here broadly appealing and obviously like our art directors because there were like executive product managers and their art directs office lis art directors really like what about the forum guy we don't have a 4 I'm glad you know it's like but forearms are not appealing you know kind of thing to everyone looks grouse right so what happens is like okay like this mean it's like I'm gonna try a forearm last one last thing if you guys really think you hated it and that's that's it right but they really love this time attic because again the narrative space felt like they wanted a underground arena thing and there's gonna be an event and then he's a perfect fit for that so okay alright let's go for it so here's my next bread like it's getting closer because you don't see the dinosaur dairy anymore right but I did try to forearms and then they felt like no no like forearms and also while I'm doing these drawings the the gameplay is still cooking they're testing they're testing and they failed they felt like oh I can't I can't do like like week there's like a technical issue about like grabbing a character or grabbing a player and then you're just gonna keep him on under your armpits and then it's gonna be frustrating we can't do that so yeah not only like forearms it's not broadly appealing but also like it's no longer part of the gameplay space that we're going to target but for some reason they still like the guy with the bunny ears I mean Fox ears I mean Wolverine ears I did say bunny ears and there was like what it was like I mean Wolverines edgy so edgy everyone wants edgy you're right yeah give that edginess to them so we picked B and start to polish just try to like design this whole thing it was like oh my god like the weapon might as well like his clothing should be very very um like you know like unique to him because because yeah we rely on weapons for human character this one of his like core abilities were like he absorbs damage as much as he has or absorb damage like there's a Baro meter and then if he releases it in punch could be like a lot depends how much damage he uh he absorbs so yeah non mild maps actually sometimes we make fun of it we're like non-spicy extra spicy this is just for fun all right um just like to review our to review the things that's really like you know things to learn not this is not only in in studio but also when you try to do like content part in your own like quality thinking over quantity make sure like before you before you draw already know you really plot the things out in your brain or you have a mood board and then you draw it rather than like noodling noodling noodling uh I was like but you know you get tired of it right fusing two themes and make it thematically cohesive remember like when I did this guy like just for like variations just I just fuse two different thematic basically yeah a grappler or like punchy guy and then something else it could be a dinosaur right so optimize all shapes functionality and avoid adding shapes just for the sake of just shapes so if you want to add shapes make sure it has a great function in it if you just add shapes just for the sake of it it's not very feasible it's not efficient because animators will get angry it's like all this cloth and then we're not using it that much so less is more just remember that less is more is very very important all right another character that I wanted to actually introduce so Sena is a character that's connected to our this guy called Lucien and Lucien is our character as well but he got released like few years ago before Senna and they're husband and wife we brought her back to the dead because players would like it we're actually asking for this all right and I'm just going to basically it's a character with BFG big freakin gun and these are like some explorations obviously like we're trying to stick with the big gun weapon and done by different like artists as well because you know he's a she's couldn't be a really popular character cuz her her husband which is a character like few years ago is also popular and everyone's been asking for for her it was like are you guys gonna make her a champion cuz it's cool and we were like oh maybe you know we're not supposed to promise them but everyone actually had fun and jump on it and when we just like you know jam on it everyone has different ideas everyone has different interpretation about the you know the pillars and about her so it's cool but it's gonna be taken further by mister just in Alvers again and then he actually did so much cool shapes right here still stick with the gun and then you know he's he's one of those like but let me try and let me try those little guns you know even though we need we need big gun it was like well let me try this Lucas like oh okay okay just one just what this one and I helped him with like costume identification because like she is also like in a very strict timeline because there's a lot of things that's like depending on her design like if you if you actually look her up she has her own CG like narrative CG as well and more BFG she finally give up on that loot two tiny guns because we have so many dual pistols already in our in our game so we were like no big gun please big gun actually even a designer says oh okay okay okay big gun big gun cuz there were there was a time that he actually explored like what if it's two guys it's like they're gone right I was like okay okay big gun big gun but he's she's extremely popular right now well-received Kerik they're very very very resonant worldwide according to our insights and this is her like rape abilities just former explorations and this is her final concept it's pretty good alright LEM another thing I know like Dan actually I mentioned about skin so what are skins it's an in-game cosmetics yes so these are like I know the characters that we need to like oh we got a we got a stay you know creative and make sure it doesn't look like you know things that we pull out in Google but what if we want to see this guy in an anime world you know or like an in in Sailor Moon world kind of thing like that but so this is where it's from now and this is this is where we actually make some fun stuff what if the character is existed in our alternative universe let's say our champion is this guy Ezreal so Ezreal is also a character you know in our video game and we combine him with anime cyber Academy what would that look like yeah battle cabin academia Ezreal going on reverse here so here are the explorations these are done by Simon Simon I don't want to butcher his last name I'm gonna spell it later so this these are done by Simon just like a little bit introduction and Simon he before he came to riot he is shalyah lead the effects artists and he says he doesn't want to do it anymore so he stopped working being a lead VFX artist and he wants to spend his four years in study in concept art and this is where he's at which is really cool oh and this is done by Paul Kwan so he actually explored with Simon with this thematic as well no some explorations and then more explorations cool like he he he's actually trying to communicate how these things open in a fancy way because you know like our original should be basic and these alternative universe should be the fancy wants some more explorations about the fancy ones and you know where his VFX skills are creeping in now he's combining with his concept art skills who flashy he would even like do some final pitches like this where again this is how he communicates how to make things like exciting was like cool alright you want to make it it was like yeah it looks cool let's make it some like you know ideas as well it's pretty cool he even has more ideas of that - it's like a cool combo of like VFX knowledge in concept part school I usually I just I can just watch this like or the next ten minutes it's so hypnotizing you know it's like makes up really good timing colors like yeah you get with all that recipe you get awesome food right yep and some like explorations for is recall yeah so nice [Music] and this is a final concept for Ezreal battle academia one more one more example from his work let's take Jax he's also from our League of Legends character what if we mix it with O warring kingdoms and Gundam and it's going to be makeup warring kingdoms Jax so this is his concept again like less you know less quantity more quality um so we picked this one because this one speaks Jax more and some of his explorations like cool explorations like how it looks like when he's back close back open like you ready know what it looks like but he still animates it so like okay cool it's amazing this one glows - I didn't know that I notice it just right now it's like how the weapon works or how his front will open up alright um so like so those fancy gifts gifts whatever no like it's it's kind of scary even even me I can only do looping and my timings is really cringey but anyways like if you're not up to like learning how to make things move you can there are ways how to make things look it moves by just like you know drawing an image right so I'm going back to again on us work because she is definitely the expert of like expressing an image that looks like it's moving and you know it's just basically just looking at it you know the directionality of it so this is her concept of a dark star guardian Zooey little furry friends right there of course you will explore more furry friends you know my favorite right there so cute even her so cute Oh take all them at home but and you know explore some details like care and explore more little friends right there I guess they picked the octopus not the dragon here's her exploration of like alternative thematic on to her one of her abilities maybe she she throws her octopus you know or another star or it could be another Dark Star so this one's really cool cuz like yeah these image doesn't move but you already know what it does is like oh now come over here you know or like these stars are like almost like going in the center like a black hole or or like you got these little cute hands that make you fall asleep I guess so but yeah it's just frozen image doesn't need to move but you already know what it does by just looking at it and some like exploration so for like when she teleports she could turn into like or merge with her octopus yeah these even these things right you don't even have to do a scrolling texture you already know how it moves just like even looking at like a simpleness like just black and white or like a line work she just properly distorts some edges shapes and what do you have like you can tell where it's actually going that's cool by the way this character has so many toys so she has to design all these but she doesn't care cuz she loves this characters like I'm gonna design all these toys so I don't care like yo-yo jump rope there's three of three of yo-yos and there's three of jump ropes like I'm just gonna have one yo-yo jump rope doesn't matter or even my knee user octopus ooh you know for a jump rope by just even looking at knees you're so expressive like manipulating shapes stretch squish or like you know like the comet head comet tail and even like their expressions you can tell like you know smirking I don't care whoa all that stuff right it's it's so easy to tell by just like few shapes she was able to communicate it without like moving it and finally this is her like final concept of star guardian Zoe it's painted on top of model we usually actually go back and forth or what if this one's not working was like okay let me correct that or like our 3d character artist will say like oh hey can you you know check it again if I did the shape and then we were just gonna like correct it for them just to like remind keep reminding them we're done Northstar is cuz sometimes like yeah you spent all your time sculpting or painting you tend to get lost but like we usually get like fresh eyes from our peers across disciplines as well and yeah just just like a reminder like from my lecture less is more again quality thinking over quantity trying be efficient with your energy by keeping in mind about the goals thank you [Applause] all right can you hear me I can hear myself so how's it going everybody yeah awesome my name is Lanna Basinski I am a senior animator at Riot Games but even though I have the privilege of coming to talk with you definitely within the list of speakers but even on the floor on my team I am certainly the newest person there I've only been at Riot about six months so because I haven't been there that long I am going to take just a second to go over a bit of my path to riot but before I do I really want to thank Rachel Compton which hopefully this doesn't embarrass her or maybe hopefully it does it's fine but I was feeling a little bit stumped on what I might want to come talk to you guys about so like a true professional I wrote a tweet asking and she very kindly reached out to me and gave me a little bit of insight on how I might focus this talk and I really appreciate it so I hope that I can be equally helpful to you guys as Rachel was to me Thank You Rachel yeah so this talk was billed as a day in the life of an artist but I'm actually going to spend most of my talk not so much painting an explicit picture of what my exact day to day looks like so much as hopefully illustrating the ways in which you as students or young developers can feel more prepared to tackle something like it and so I'll take this quick jump through my history it's actually pretty short so don't worry but then I'm going to talk a little bit about my animation process and the types of conversations I'm making when prepping animations for being in game so I'm Lana Brzezinski I'm from Edmonton Alberta Canada originally and I went to school at the madami of art University in San Francisco where I got a Bachelor of Fine Arts in animation with an emphasis in 3d creature animation that's a used logo I know that being in school it can sometimes feel like a bit of a race to get out and into that first big industry gig but I really feel like there are a lot of things that I did while I was in school that really made me feel prepared to work in the industry things that I would have found really challenging for me to accomplish anywhere else for example I learned how to animate which is pretty cool and this is actually the first thing I would like to take a moment on because it's something I wish I thought more about and really took to heart while I was in school and is probably my biggest piece of advice for getting into the industry and that is I would advise you to learn how to animate really I know that it sounds silly and obvious but to be very frank I was very close to making my whole part of this talk entirely on this subject not because I've seen a lot of crappy reels coming out of schools so much as because I really do wish I thought harder about it while I was studying so to take a quick aside like let's think about it what we get to do at work every day is awesome it is compelling and it's collaborative and it's super super fun however there's also a pretty extreme amount of sort of potential pressure that you could feel there are deadlines which can sometimes be urgent and while there is time for a bit of trial and failure at certain tasks that you have ultimately the people who surround you your team is relying on your ability to knock things out of the park but not just your craft not just animating but working collaboratively brainstorming team building understanding and implementing your work using the best practices for the project that you're working on and all of that extra stuff starts to get pretty hard to do if you don't know how to animate which again I know is so silly sounding so anecdotally while I was in school I really did want to race through I was like get the bouncing ball out of my face give me the hard stuff I thought that by jumping into sort of more complicated characters or rigs I was somehow going to prove myself and that line of thinking really hindered me for a few years and school is only a few years long so I'll let you do the math on that one well the trick is and or at least something I certainly didn't think about and something I would hope that you'd keep in mind whether you are just starting out on your studies or you're working hard at picking and polishing those real pieces for it to start applying for jobs is that within a certain scope of reason animation is just animation and the fundamentals the principles that you are learning on something like a bouncing ball is still the language that we use when we're talking about something more complicated like mecha Jack's so what I really want to say is not learn how to animate because you know that but you need to let yourself slow down and learn the language and school is so beautiful because you have the time to let yourself do that the principles are so important but animating in a collaborative setting is so much more than just making things move on the screen taking time to intrinsically understand to know the vocabulary to the very marrow of your bones everything that surrounds those principles is going to do nothing but help you when you actually get on the floor the riot animation team most of us pictured here we are rooted in feedback culture so do you guys know what I mean when I say feedback culture nods shakes it means that we're constantly giving each other feedback on our work notes about things that we upload and share with the team and to do so that means we are fluent in the principles so if you haven't take your taken the time to let yourself learn this language a community like this and feedback like that can be pretty overwhelming so if you are struggling with something polish on a shot something in your work isn't feeling quite right maybe it would be good time to take a break and go back to something simpler like a bouncing ball because when you practice hard on learning the principles on the easy stuff more complex animations you might fight with aren't really so complicated under the surface so this is dawnbringer soraka and this was animated by Christopher Singh and while the bouncing ball at the beginning obviously isn't perfect just animating by itself there the strategy that he used to implement this run is the same this is a screen shot of the Y translation on the route of a run that I completed this week and while I can't show you the character looking at the graph editor alone you can see that this is the exact same sort of execution I would practice in a fundamental exercise so regardless of how much time you have left it's my hope that you really let yourself steep in the culture of learning that you're surrounded with and practice that language before you're trying to juggle a dozen other things at once anyway back to me school was cool and while I was started studying I also started a club like a cool cool kid it's called tea time animation and it gave me experience networking and working collaboratively and planning and scheduling and a lot of fun soft soft skills stuff that I still use day-to-day I also got student passes for everything like women and animation memberships Asifa I was a conference associate or one of the volunteer coordinators at the Game Developers Conference and the culmination of all these various experiences eventually helped me to land here an internship at Blizzard Entertainment where I worked on Starcraft two heart of the swarm and then after I finished my degree I was hired back on full-time for a game called heroes of the I work for Blizzard Entertainment for about five and a half years until eventually very shocking I was offered a role as a senior animator at Riot Games and now I'm here talking to you awesome yeah thank you so one of the things I hear most as an animator is what are you looking for in entry-level work so to a certain extent that is subjective to does that mean moving my butt on the chair yeah my bad so to a certain extent that is subjective to the animator who's reviewing your work but did I turn it off now okay I'm fine but if you're asking me I'm looking for a fundamental understanding of both the principles and their application to animation in a game setting for example I am at riot on the League of Legends team and that means I'm looking for things like bold character choices responsive timing and clear poses so for the rest of my little block of time I'm going to cover some of the things that we think about at work when we're trying to hit home these ideas when I was studying animation I'm gonna prepare you I'm gonna ask for audience interaction so a couple you maybe talk to me when I was studying animation I heard a lot of stuff thrown around for what it means to animate well for a game like playing to gamera vs. animating the whole body or you know ignoring certain principles of animation and it got me really curious what you guys might think or like what have you heard make are some things that make for good video game animation or what is the role of a game animator open question yeah to try as hard as possible to avoid the uncanny valley sure we're doing some pretty unbelievable things in video games we got to make that believable anyone else about the back there make something very satisfying to do absolutely if I'm gonna punch somebody what set I want to punch somebody with set one more hem to show the player what's clearly going on absolutely we have to know what's going on in fact we have to know what's going on so much and to clearly establish any of these things if I were to sort of sum that up and one idea or concept it would be that of communication game play animators are communicators so when I'm developing animation for in-game there are two main buckets that I'm communicating about one is game play especially for a fast-paced eSport like League of Legends I want to provide clarity for the design as a player I need to know if I'm having successful inputs and I will also need to know if something's hitting me and also how hard so one of my favorite recent examples of this was work done on our boy mecha Jax who you saw a little bit of earlier um let's see if I can get this work in so this is a work in progress video from our development of the skin this was animated by Nick Matthews and while many characters in League have sort of a distinct spells that they use as their ability set in game Jax is a character who has several abilities that enhance the way he does his base level attack so at first glance you'd be easy-peasy I animate my attack and I've already done the abilities done but it can be very difficult to properly communicate where the damage is coming from and make it look varied and visually interesting for the player so in this video he has three different styles of attack regular auto attack an auto attack that is triggered by his ultimate ability and an auto attack that's triggered from his W ability I'll sort of start it over so we can see a big swipe across regular regular that's the alt auto attack and then you'll see a timer show up here then you'll see the other variants of attack and he sort of comes horizontally across let's see if I could posit right there he hits that horizontal pose across there and some of the things I love about this initial set is it's very clear language for the damage these horizontal swipes across two big orange swipes beautiful effects work and support there those are the low damage hits meanwhile the vertical hits that are the big swipe down and the vertical jab those are the critical attacks so you know as a player if you're seeing this motion you're taking more damage and if you see this motion you're taking less damage but of course this character does have spells and that's pretty obvious because there's that beautiful effects work it the staff starts spinning above his head and you get those beautiful swoops lines in the big circle but he still can do those same special auto attacks well this ability is going on so even though he's using a different weapon in his offhand the same visual language is present horizontal swipes for the low damage and another vertical jab with the offhand blade to indicate the empowered attack now watching the video at full speed it may seem somewhat chaotic especially to someone who's unfamiliar with that character or to the genre of the game but when we're working on a game that has highly nuanced competitive play players are looking for those pose changes those visual indicators tell them that their abilities are landing correctly or perhaps when their enemy is a little bit weaker so the other thing I'm communicating about as an animator is of course character players want characters that resonate with them with distinct and nuanced personalities at riot a lot of a players first interactions with a champion come from things like the character illustration that they see or even sometimes a character cinematic but loading into the game players don't want to just see a visual representation of that character they want to feel like that and it's often up to the animators to successfully translate the fantasy into the play space the personalities should be felt through the entirety of an ability set of course but some of our larger more character-driven moments in champions for the League of Legends are the emotes which are jokes taunts and recalls or an ability that you play to port yourself back to home base so I'm going to do a quick walkthrough of my process for a recall I did for bewitching misfortune which was a halloween-themed skin for this character and this is misfortune here to show you what I mean I was super excited to animate this because it was my very first animation at riot and the direction I got came out of a brainstorming meeting that happened before I started at the company and the direction I got for the recall was Miss Fortune summons pumpkin Miss Fortune walks around pumpkin Miss Fortune is on pumpkin so not a lot of coherent detail but that's okay we worked with it and let's find a personality so I start out with drawing some sketches of what I want the recall to look like these are some of my final ones and I think I threw out the other ones I'm sorry and while I was sketching out ideas a few things came to mind and one is that I don't think Miss Fortune is just gonna walk around and plop down on a pumpkin Miss Fortune is a witch in the skin so I think it'd be cooler if we came up with something a little more magical and Miss Fortune is like super sassy and a little provocative so we can probably try and work some of that in there too so to try and make this summon and is on top of pumpkin pumpkin character more character-driven instead of walking around the pumpkin she's going to like our magically dissolve one of her guns and and manifest a tiny pumpkin that she will kiss like a frog prince and it will become like a new pumpkin buddy or Ede this is my first pass blocking of that idea and I really want to note that I work in a layered technique so my blocking has like a smooth feel to it but pretty much everyone else on the team does work in stepped I like this as an example because I think there's a lot that I did right but I definitely didn't nail everything on my first shot so I had some cute ideas and a lot of the buoyant personality of misfortune is coming through but I was simultaneously over-and-under doing it a little my subtle stuff at the beginning is too subtle so the pose changed between when she sort of spawns in a pumpkin and kisses the pumpkin was the details were so small that when you zoom out to the appropriate game view they don't read at all and then things ramp up really quickly after that so she kind of kisses his pumpkin and it grows and she hits this big pose like yeah I did it but she's only halfway through this motion that she's trying to do so there wasn't like a big ramp into like a clearly climactic moment so this is my second pass and I'm working on refining those character beads and providing more clarity to the motions so she takes a slightly bigger step to the right and then the arm motion summoning the pumpkin is a much broader circle to get that big motion and drawing the eye to this moment the antic that she has when she leans in to bend to kiss the pumpkin is a much bigger change where I tipped her head up and get the Hat out of the way to catch sort of her the highlight of her cheek in that big swoosh of hair so it really draws the eye into that kissing moment to make sure people focused on what we want them to be focused on and then when she sort of recoils out of that kiss I'm not throwing her into the celebration pose but I'm really considering what the characters considering in this moment where she's upright and she's proud but she's really just analyzing what the next step is going to be from that pose it was a lot smoother to get into the shooting pose and then I keep her really still so that when the pumpkin has its big moment and now we have this big beautiful face on it you're not conflicted between who you want to look at misfortune or the pumpkin we let the pumpkin have his little moment and then she gets that big stretch frame in and then holds in the pose on top of the pumpkin long enough for the player to be able to read it before they disappear back to base after this the team agreed that I nailed the character and I was on to my polish pass so moving into Polish I first decided to make a decision regarding the implementation of this ability or this animation specifically so because the recalls are not directly gameplay related than the animation themselves the most important thing is this big blue ring that shows up around them that you'll see in the next slide I decided to lock this animation to always face the camera so usually we do want all animations to have something really fun to look at no matter which way you're standing around them but sometimes like in the case where you have a jack-o'-lantern there's not a face on the back of the jack-o'-lantern it's worth it to lock it to make sure that you get the perfect read every time locking the camera also means I can adjust some of the poses to read better from the more static angle because my process result revolves around a layering style animation technique my polish past looks a little different than some of the guys at work where I often find that my timing feels great but I need time to tweak individual poses for a cleaner negative space shapes so I usually tackle broader stuff like that first all of these drivers you see were my actual notes from the review that we had at work so in the upper left hand corner you could see like the elbows kind of disappearing behind her ahead and it'd be great to get that really clear zigzag of the the sassy cute arms out after I make like the bigger moments really clear I like I mean polish is really not easier than just going through with a fine-tooth comb and getting all those tangles out so looking at the breakdowns and in-betweens and making sure that you if you're pointing that straight is like a a little straight line in the middle you can see it's a little wobbly I think a very natural bend in the elbow I was like now just crank it out there and make sure that you're you're drawing people where you want them to go adding a little drag wherever possible and even through smear frames making sure that there are really deliberate clear shapes in those faster motions so you can see in the bottom left image I actually hadn't adjusted those legs since the blocking pass but when you played it full speed you don't notice that the pole vectors are going crazy so even though you can't really catch it making the adjustments to have that clear shape make everything feel just really buttery smooth and when all is said and done this is where I ended up I've got strong poses and a clear execution of the character beats I was looking for which are buoyant and magical and a little bit sassy or provocative I've got a ramp of emotion into the eventual climactic hit for the recall and and then it's also really important to note that I didn't have the time to hit every note that I was given but I distilled the feedback from my team and addressed what was most pressing in the order of how much time I had to do it and what would affect the overall mood of the piece and so if you have any questions or ever want to chat about animation or game development I really love that stuff so I am Atlit and I on Twitter and it's my pleasure to introduce you to a Jason Keyser [Applause] fantastic Hey good good talk good talk how you guys doing all right been in your seats for about an hour if you want to stand up you can stand up now with me I've been my seat I'm enjoying the stretch go ahead and just like shake it off do a little bit of calisthenics we spend all our lives and dungeons we don't get to get out much and exercise so I remember in school we'd just be down in the in the underbelly of the art building and me just be just hunched over typing on our keyboards and drawing on Cintiq s-- all right well it's great to be here I love Norman I mean I remember learning about Norman years ago through the DVDs originally and just such an honor to be here pleasure to be here with you all right so I am Jason Keyser I am a visual effects artist at Riot Games as you can see and I do real time via effects which the term VFX is a little overloaded in the industry between film and games a lot of people use it basically I make sparkles and particle animation and filming might call it FX animation I say real-time because it happens you know you don't have to wait for Houdini to render your particle systems you can just see him right in front of you instantly which is really nice all right so a little bit about me I'll just make sure I got everything straight so I work on League of Legends with these two wonderful people that you've heard from already I've been at riot for about six years and so during my time at riot I've bounced around a lot I was on the skins team like Lana is currently I was on the champion team like Gemma is currently and then I went over to some of our unannounced stuff that's going on in mystery land for a couple years and now I'm back on Team fight tactics which is sort of sort of a mode sort of a separate game from League of Legends it's using League of Legends assets and a whole new way to play so kind of have my turn at a variety of stuff and it's been a wonderful experience so far I really like working with these incredible champions we get to bring sort of very unique and distinct thematics and things into our game through the skins of the champions and it's it's a really fun live product to work on all right so while I was at school I guess I should say well I went to school I was it I was at Brigham Young University in Utah back in the day back in like 2006 so I've been getting odd jobs since then so it's been like what now 14 years today that I've just thought like random jobs while I was in school and then after school and so forth minding it right eventually while it BYU I did a short film that was effects based as you can see it's the water boy and the fire girl it's called a light you can go check it out on YouTube that was a ton of fun and my first experience really just diving deep with effects and drawing them frame by frame and just feeling out the water and the fire and the motion of it and just it all came to life for me in the characters and I was so exciting I got to study under Ryan Woodward he's a really good effects artist he started as an effects artist and became a storyboard artist and now he just does everything I guess he's just super multi-talented and it was a pleasure learning from him the age-old craft of making fire also worked on a game called Animal Jam while I was in school and then after school for a while as well this was a really fun game for kids lots of really cool style AZ stuff spent a month on Powerpuff Girls while I was at Riot that was a lot of fun just like doing effects concepts and designs with them as well and very similar to Atlanta really loved teaching a love sharing and I love all that stuff so got YouTube I've got you know an outreach for education and effects called the effects apprentice as well and just all this in the free time that I don't have in addition to my full time job it's great it's so much fun I actually just keep throwing myself into it and just can't get enough of this this is my jam alright so for my portion of the evening I'm gonna be sharing war stories from me and some of my awesome compatriots these are some really good friends of mine at Riot Games and we're gonna go in this order and talk about just a little few little stories that we've been through on the battlefront making effects you're going to want to stay in touch with some of these individuals if you are interested in effects I highly recommend following them and we all we all like hearing from you all as you're interested in coming to apply it riot or just learn more about what effect animation even is in games and how you can get started awesome so first story Taliah so i during my short spin on the champion team i had the pleasure of working on Thalia and she is a stone weaver she was able to pull rocks out of the ground and throw them at your face and they do tons of magic damage and because she's a page even though they're physical objects don't think about it too hard anyway so that was actually one of the challenges that we had for like she's doing magic damage but it's stone does physical damage but and that's a whole discussion for another day anyway so Thalia is basically like I said ripping stones out of the ground and throwing them and we wanted to I'm just gonna go into the story of one of her four abilities which is her cue ability where she rips up a disk area on the ground and then uses the stones from that area to fling them she's things five stones and if she's standing on that area later when she ties it again it's already been ripped up so she only throws one stone that makes sense so way I've got this set up I'm just gonna play a video and it's just gonna go through all the different phases that we worked on with Thalia there's everything from the character work to the animation even a little bit of engineering and and of course the the effects portion just give you a quick snapshot of what we go through on one of these champions with just one out of their four abilities okay so click the play but yeah okay so here it is at full speed she's ripping up a circle of ground and flinging it and I'll play in slow motion for ya so you see you've got the effects of the stones kind of coming up and then you got these floating meshes around her and then they kind of fake it like they twirl and when in slow motion breaks the illusion but you can see it flying out and has this nice a zippy timing for the five stones so going into this character there's a lot of modeling and a lot of texturing that needs to be done and we need to have a good idea of what we're after so if the concept art this is by hang chewy you know we're thinking we want really nice texture of like the stone coming up and out and for this I'm an effects artist and I I dabbled in painting here and there but you can see my stones I think I did let's see I can claim this top row this is my progress and then we got an actual 3d modeler into paint this texture here for the stones on this and so it was very collaborative of course here's the character artist she is their character artist texture sheet there so there was tons of different concepts that we were working with like you know how is this worked ground gonna look once she's right ripped it up do we want patterns on these things and you know we've kind of put these big stamps in the game and they were really loud and busy and really disrupted the gameplay space as schools they looked here it was a little bit overwhelming seeing you know this epic area that just really only impacted her this one character that she can only throw one missile on instead so we landed on something much more light touch we ended up going with the one on the left and that way you can see through it you can still see the map below and it's not too crazy and disruptive so then here's the awesome character animation for it just played without any effects it's kind of interesting always to see that here it is here's the rig that they were working with on this character looks like she's a crazy person without effects going on right here's the gameplay space so this disk area and then the missiles really that's when I when I get it as the effects artist that's the state that it's in and then here we have the different elements we've got the unworked when she's not standing on it and then when she is standing on it so it actually highlights when she walks over it here you can see all the different meshes and textures going on let's see I'll kind of slow down a little bit for this part slots taken I know there's a lot of thinking while I was working on it I was like what's going on there's a lot to keep track of here okay so you can see I'll just pause it you can see this dusty texture is mapped to a mesh that kind of just rotates and then I scroll the texture as well around and then there's a spiral texture you can see the one that's like tucking in tighter right here that has these sort of motion blurred stones painted so it's actually just a flat sheet of stone that kind of like swooshes up toward her and then right here's the rocks that rotate around her we saw that earlier and then this one is a lot brighter than these ones because it's important for gameplay to see this hot almost white tip of the missile that's headed at your face I'm going to need a ton of tons of damage right so it's important to know where that's at so you can that's the important part that you need to get out of the way the rest of this stuff is just dressing its toppings you know it's like for aesthetics and feel but it's not actually critical to gameplay the way that this missile is and that's something I love is an effects artist is I get to sort of straddle that line like I'm always talking to artists you know like how can we sell this theme and make it super epic and get the nice timing and I'm hitting up animators all the time about their timing expertise to just get that perfect but then also I'm going over to the other pit with all the game designers like okay like how do I make this clear and how to make it satisfying and you know what's the thematic that we're looking for here as far as like the power fantasies to feel light and quick or to go on and feel like heavy and like you know tanky all those kinds of things and sort of having a lot of back and forth and the VFX artist has to kind of settle or satisfy two masters it's like has to be beautiful it has to be perfectly clear and satisfying and all these things all at once and it's really it's actually really fun challenge that I like being in the middle of all right so there we go we got all the different parts you can see meshes went is low poly as I possibly could to get them to be nice and performant okay is that an engineer saying thank you yes oh you just like oh you're a player who likes having high frames per second yes me too that's funny engineers are always like coming to me like with that look on their face I'm like Oh what did I do like your frame rates garbage fix it now we're shipping tomorrow oh my god I'm sorry okay so so here's a like each champion not every champion but a lot of times new champions require new technology so what's cool about that is every champion after that gets the benefit from that technology so when Thalia came out we didn't have a way to render something over the ground but beneath the characters and it's always like guaranteed to show up over the ground but then not show up on these areas like the walls and like other areas like that and so I actually had to paint this mask and then the engineers hooked it up and this is a flip version of summoners rift fun fact summoners rift is upside down when we export from Maya the Z coordinate is flipped 180 degrees and so everything is like opposite in the way that it's red and the camera I guess when they were making the game they just moved the camera around 180 degrees one day and nobody moved it back so so now everything is flipped in our game it's pretty cool so this is mid lane but it's like the wrong way but this is correct for our engine which is kind of funny it's just it's a great time working on games it's so funny like I was talking with this guy he's like this veteran he's for it to all these major studios and I was just like griping about our tools and how like oh man I just it's just a real struggle it's like feels like it's all cobbled together like what are we even doing and he's like it's this way everywhere that I've ever worked I'm like but you've worked here I want name Studios you've worked here and here are you seriously it's like yeah it's it's a mess behind the curtain man don't even so just don't get your hopes up on amazing tools going into the industry itself we're all just getting by and what we have so anyway but I say it with love everyone is like doing their absolute but it's just the nature of game development we want to get content out for the players or we can spend months just fixing everything and it's like we got it like bounce that and it's a really tricky balance to do also an art I'm just an artist I I'm on I'm on the game all the times people like fix your game and I'm like I just make art I'm sorry it's not my fault I just throw my colleagues under the bus all the time sorry guys yeah we just take it in stride and take a vacation every now and then because it's stressful okay so no it's not bad actually so anyway so you can see with the mask that Eclipse out in certain areas that was a lot of explainin for one slide and then we have the audio which is not playing but you can imagine them it's funny how we overlook audio that's really the other half of visual effects I would say they don't get enough credit for their work a lot of movies that you watch where you remember it being so stinking epic if you just mute it it is at least half as epic if not even way less the audio really drives these things home so and we don't have audio but you can you can go play the game or watch it on YouTube and you can hear the sound that she makes when she flings the rocks okay so that was still yeah onto new new Jim talked about new new earlier Olly MacDonald he's lead the effects artists over on the skins team and really all of personalisation he was tasked with making a very unorthodox for our typical stuff for our typical IP sort of skin line this was a new skin that skin line that we were trying out which is the paper craft so paper craft is like one of those whimsical world where everything's made of paper it's like more lighthearted and fun but not necessarily compatible with the base world that we already have that you were seeing with Tullius screenshots right like we have a pretty standard like sort of hand-painted style and world that feels very grounded it is stylized of course but it has like you know sort of believable stuff whereas the paper craft is much more imaginative so he was faced with the challenge of rescanning an icy character to be paper-based but all the abilities are still functionally the same so with the ultimate ability and in particular that was a fun challenge and you can see here what he does is he winds up in this big area of effect and after a few seconds he basically nukes everyone if you if you're standing in that circle you're your host and you're gonna be in a lot of trouble get a lot of damage so here's how he tackled this challenge so starting out he knew he wanted to try ripping the paper I should preface this as well by saying this is really tricky because paper is opaque it's solid it's not see-through and visual effects are typically very transparent so you can see some of these elements swirling in he's kind of already colored to yellow but this is like the cold arctic breeze coming in from the base skin that was already done and then there's some other like sort of icy cracks that you'll see forming underneath this that's from the base but he's already come in on his first pass and he's done a lot of like you know paper and he's been testing out you know how do we get it to feel like it's like ripping open you knows this texture comes he's got a little mesh that's like got a simple rig where it can flap well he really liked that flapping motion that was happening on that little rig and so he made a strip of paper here that sort of like peels up and sort of flaps in the wind before it explodes and that was working really well and he was so proud of how he was doing and this by the way I have full permission for Molly to tell us full story and everything I'm about to describe he was very proud of how that was working for him with the rig that he decided to you know expand it out and like do some more rips and tears coming out he's like yeah this is awesome I'm like a multidisciplinary ninja I'm able to do my own textures my own meshes and even my own rig to get this going well it got to this point where you know he's really excited about it and then you know in one of the reviews and Christopher Singh who was mentioned earlier pointed out oh hey like let me just grab that from you and I'll just sort of refine the timing there's just some things in there that I want to let gets nice flapping and some wind up for you he's like awesome here's my rig and he's like so proud proud handing it to Christopher and Christopher gets it and it's like oh this rig is not usable and this is like again with always permission telling this story he's like it was very humbling moment for him because he realized that early on you know he could have at least asked a technical artist or a rigging artist hey what's the best practice with building a rig like this here's what I want to do and maybe even getting pointers on how to do it but instead kind of just went off in a clustered aloneness and made it on his own and then it ended up that professional rigger had to make it from scratch anyway so that's lesson learned there is don't be afraid to collaborate don't be afraid to ask for help we professionals make that mistake all the time anyway you can see you know once they got the proper rig and Christopher's awesome animation that just has this nice timing of how it like rips open and the line between visual effects and animation is very blurry right a lot of what we do it's kind of hard to describe sometimes because it's like yes some modeling is some texturing it's some rigging temporary rigging that kind of thing I often say if you're a generalist there's a high chance that you might love doing visual effects that's just the shameless plug for what we do also it's in very high demand it's hard to find good effects artists so if you're not sure what to do because you kind of like to do everything don't decide just do effects and then you get to do everything it's great alright so then we got a bad boy set he's really softy though you know he's a softy right so Lindsay Reese is another senior effects artist on the champion team and she was presented with a challenge on this guy you saw the awesome concept art in gems presentation with how he was like punching it was like yellow and black with like yellow electricity jumping off of it so they kind of knew the color palette they wanted to go with for his effects but they had a challenge where his ultimate ability he creates this giant crater in the ground by grabbing an enemy and jumping with them through the air and body slamming them into the ground it's very much a grappling fantasy and it's like getting your whole and stay in there right and so they wanted them to actually be slowed when they're trying to climb up out of this crater that he's just created with their head into the ground right so this was the challenge was sell it so that he smashes into the ground and creates an area that's hard to get and climb up out of and so okay easy enough we start with some temporary art borrowed from other characters this is gali gali oz ultimate where he like smashes down and also creates a big AOE this wasn't working so well because that's nice dream it wasn't really working quite as well simply because it this is gonna be in my way rip okay but you remember it's like a flat plane right and they wanted it to feel more like a crater fair enough you can see it here flat plains cool cracks so next Lindsey went ahead and literally did just the crater oh there but you can see instantly a problem with the crater which is that the collision this dead Annie here is floating right and this one's standing and he's standing and the more times you see it the more you notice it and also like you know shadows are turned off but if if they were turned on inside of this crater somehow which I don't even think we can do particles receiving shadows in our game but there's no shadows so it doesn't feel right at all they're just floating above this like dip in the ground and to create collision to go down in was an engineering feat that we didn't have the resources for and even if we did it probably would be super expensive and really hard to implement so yeah this crater solution not working super well so what were they gonna do to make it feel like it was a pit that you had to climb out of that is the challenge indeed and I think it's gonna get to the next one the sec yeah okay so next up they use this sort of animated mesh and again this is like multidisciplinary with like this feelings of like these rocks coming out and I believe this was borrowed from the saundra if I'm not mistaken and then just recolored with different things and they're like aha yeah it's awesome except it's just like covering up the entire map right it's like this giant weird stony thing but they like the feel of it and the fact that the ground was broken was like a nice compromise because now it's actually hard to sort of climb out of that area because it's like uneven ground right and so the final result was a custom mesh that looks like this so it's a combination of texture and mesh and that's to help with the resolution so if it was just a texture we needed a really high resolution texture to show that off too high for the budget so by using a mesh with like different stony faces and things we could actually have nice crisp edges without depending always on the texture to be nice and crisp cool stuff alright then our gal Soraka this the Starchild so Kevin Leroy has an awesome back story of his own Kevin was you know living in Europe and then in Canada and he had been doing some really awesome fan art for our game he was doing visual effects for skins that didn't exist so he's like here's what I would want to do you know if I wanted to make this champion into this thematic and he was just posting those online and we took interested or like hey buddy these are pretty cool you want to just come do that but like get paid and might do it that's good so he's like sure that sounds awesome and he came over and we were all really excited to have this awesome union so kevin was doing this amazing Soraka skin which was in - Tonga so these are all pretty recent things that we've been working on where basically instead of being all-star somatic she's more of a holy thematic this is the dawn bringer line this was high fantasy holy angel kind of vibe going on and easy enough because rock is a healer right like that's her whole kit is like she hits you with the comet from the sky and if it hits you then it sends us a little like wispy missile back to her that heals her health and then she can use some of that health energy to heal her allies and send little healing missiles off to her allies to restore them so pretty easy you know an angel you could kind of see how an angel of do healing except problem they wanted a second skin that was super evil but she still has the same mechanics so now she needs to do healing as well and he's like oh boy so she's red heels in our game are green so she's going to be a red thematic with green healing missiles okay we'll see how this goes challenge accepted Kevin's a rock star he can do it so first off he's starting off with just the missiles going like this is the first pass just kind of getting some basic shapes after this he's going to also start getting the character model in so with that character model he's playing around with how these flowy angelic tassels are gonna feel he's thinking about are they going to be particle ribbons are they gonna be caracter dangly ribbons or some combination of both I'm just playing on a fad you'll notice as the videos progress those tassels look increasingly awesome so here he is adding you know more of a like custom angelic shapes to the decal and adding this nice like flowing motion to it and then after this he's going in and like toning down the center so each refinement past each one of these videos by the way it was a review pass and we do a review pass about once maybe twice a week and so each one of these is him checking and saying I did this thing and then us telling him oh nitpick nitpick nitpick but it's really gorgeous and keep going you know and then he's just iterating over time here he's playing around with like the healing missiles that are being shot out again pretty easy he hasn't gotten to the night bringer semantics yet so it's pretty straightforward combining the Blues with the greens you can see how that works all right so he lit up it's got this nice like aurora borealis after wisp to it going in there and yeah just like again this is like more of like refinement and stuff and at this point he's probably like kind of avoiding the night bringing because it's like it's gonna be pretty challenging but then he's like okay I'll just do recolor don't worry about the he'll at first just start to get my head around how the the red version can feel and then going back to the ultimate ability and there's this cool like you know avatar for like popping up we weren't too keen on it because it was like a 3d mesh and so the illustration version that you see here I'll just like replay the hot if I can get back far enough is it just no rip so here's the 3d mesh version again and then you can see that and then the difference when it's like an illustrator came in and then in the next one and makes it like this nice pose you can just see the difference just feels really nice to go in and add something a nice custom touch again cross-discipline collaboration so here's the evil one this is a healing ability so he's like red and green is hard okay but sort of feels like a heal that we were all like kind of stuff is like damaged dude no good luck we don't have the ideas for you good luck with that so he's like okay he goes back to the drawing board again okay now here he was on to something so here he's doing the missile and I'll see if I can yeah so we've got the green head of the missile and then the red tail but then the key things that he did because green if you just do a gradient from green to red it's slightly saturated in the middle as it transitions and so he had to manually put in a yellow element in between to keep it bright and saturated the whole way through these are the fun challenges you do if there's an effects artists is like getting color to obey your will right and then adding this really dark wispy thing as like the after to sell that it's very evil right this isn't the primary read this is definitely the primary read here this is part you're looking at so the first thing you see catches your eye the brightest no saturated part is a he'll super successful he was definitely on to something because that guy is brilliant stuff alright so then he's tossing the heel towards allies as well toss that out and it's just like a variation of it it has like some more black tender leaves in there as well sort of overlapping with those saturated colors here's a sort of snare ability that comes out with these like whiny sinister shapes that was one thing that subtly changed from this one to this one you'll notice that the decal changed so he's using the same decal here as the holy fanatic or as the dom bring or thematic and then on the next iteration here the decals custom and it's more like organic and has like sharper point eNOS to it in different spots it's a kind of differentiated to but he he just did it in phases right you get the motion first and then switch out some of the shapes later as an effects artist you can only do so much per iteration and this is a ton of iterating to get this skin to the final phase that it ends up that so the holy version of the snail is like a tranquil pool he has this nice distortion wave that comes out feels super cool you can just imagine the sound that it makes super pretty super nice and then the evil heel has like the new illustration on it here and the beauty of this is oh no questions no not yet I skipped too far so the beauty of this is I will just skip ahead because we're a long time anyway yeah so you remember how in the missile it was green at the front right at the back well in the ultimate it's green at the beginning and red at the end and then to black so if you look there's a flash of green immediately and then instantly like ghosts those goals and then reds and the blacks and so he's leading with the green it's the primary read hits you in the face you know it's a heel and then it goes to red and black and those are some of the kinds of problems that we solve as VFX artists okay and now the questions thank you so much all right looks like we got time for little questions from the audience right here oh we get everything set up you get the house lights on here so we can see what's going on I can be in the middle right and this is Melissa Hayward their creative recruiter at riot and the rest of the team here from Riot Games who has the very first question for our team up here right here up front all right so this question is for all of you so I guess I guess whenever whenever you're making a skin and I know sometimes you have to look up a reference how do you decide how you decide the reference material you use in order to create the skin take it you to get the colors as accurate as possible to get the colors specifically yeah the co is specifically like the visual color or like the flavor I'd say more at the visual I guess you also do the flavor too I don't deal a lot with the color specifically just cuz I'm doing motion I do the flavor so take it away y'all um I just want to clarify what that question they're why specifically the color is it because of the color scheme are you asking about because every skin will have a different color somatic and that's why it actually also helped to like for instance star Guardian there's always like pinks there's always like you know those public colors and then if you're going for like the like the harrowing one is which is like more on the fiery greens and all that stuff is that what you're looking for is if you're trying to look up a reference for like the pumpkin like how how would you decide what colors to use okay yes so before we actually decided on like the the theme of the skin which is like usually we brainstorm a champion right not only we brainstorm a champion when it goes to skins with the brainstorm automatic so when when they brainstorm a thematic that also goes with like okay what are the signature colors that they need to use because it's really really helpful for VFX artists and not only that make sure like there are some you know like for instance mecha kingdoms and how many like sci-fi skins do we have project another mecha Falls fire make sure they don't overlap so we want to make sure like it's not only like we were able to differentiate differentiate their color thematic but also the combination and the shape within that color in the early days it was very chaotic cuz we didn't have those like guides like but now we have like a whole sheet like a one sheet for each thematic and it gives a guide of like which colors to use and reference to look at and that kind of thing but in early days it was kind of like I don't know maybe this color and we just try stuff and it was really messy way to work very frustrating way to work and so just taking a little bit of extra time to establish a style sheet of like okay here's the Bible for this skin line or for this character specifically because like with project they're all different colors right there's an orange one a red one a pink one and so forth and so even having them next to each eye on a sheet to show how they're gonna be different just gets the team aligned so that the 3d modeller and the effects artists are like in sync about which colors to use and which ones not to use yeah it's also really important to spread out like all the goodness we can't just every we can't just have all the rainbows color rainbows in one skin so we can still make more if we don't make more that I mean if we if we don't follow that guideline things will just gonna be overlap and what's the use of like creating skin thematic and also just from the collaborative angle we have like reviews that are weekly and we also have sort of public channels that we post in so if something gets posted and it's not like the right colour somebody's gonna be in there big yeah that's not pumpkin orange and like there's always gonna be somebody who is is helping do that final finesse in the in the group know this has a great solid first question we've got another question right here Lana so dad animation that you show us how many days did you take to finish that animation how many days to do layering how many days to do the final details sure so when I approached the the misfortune recall animation my blocking doing sketches and sort of it was it was really like my first day sitting down there like we really need you to do this recall right now and so it was a little slower than I usually work because I was unfamiliar with the tools in the process so probably a day half day doing like the sketching and figuring out which direction I wanted to take it in my blocking takes me about a day to get a first pass in to show people or less depending on the length of the animation for a longer one definitely about a day and then I think total maybe five work days excellent excellent we have another question right here thank you hi I was just wondering because me and other students would like to ask do you take application right from students coming out of school and how about international students or do you prefer like people was much more experienced because like as you say you're already at buzzer and was like okay this needs time I can answer that so we take a variety of all of those things so we have internships that we do every summer applications open for internships in September and then they go all the way in through January or the following year so our internship applications just closed this January for our summer 2020 internship so every year we're on that schedule so fall and winter you can apply for the summer after the internships about 12 weeks so you can apply for those while you're still student we do take interns that are graduating the same year they do the internship or returning to school and then for associates just graduated we also hire full-time associate level positions and those are generally fresh graduates or people with zero to two years of experience and then for international students if we have a role that qualifies for visa sponsorship then we can explore international talent as well and we often partner with some international students or professionals for remote contracts when we have project-based work as well so we have a variety of ways that can bring people in to cover all those bases - two of the animators I work with every day one lives in Germany and one lives in France I sorry you're from Germany as well welcome to town we got a question right here Anna hi I'm a tech artist I just came to LA and I'm curious how much do you interface with tech artists and what kind of tools do they make for you all the time and every tool I love my tech artists every time I roll into a new team I'm like who's the tech artist I want to take them to lunch and get on their good side ASAP I heavily heavily heavily depend on tech artists the effects tends to be more technical so interfaces law I know animation interfaces with tech art as well a ton and so yeah we like any role I would say any role that is both technical and artistic sides of the brain is in very high demand and very low supply so generally speaking if you're looking whether it's more games generally if you're able to do both sides of the brain in your job somehow whether that's do your own concepts and build it in 3d or whatever like you're able to show a roundedness usually that's good I guess it depends on the studio studio that you go to I know that we highly value it when people can do both so yes tech art they are that we have a small army of tech artists that is growing not fast enough to help us relieve some of the tech debt that we have in our pipeline and that's just on League of Legends we also have future games that need scrappy tech artists to help prop up new pipelines and new games that were working on and figure out you know all the needs of the artists on those teams that are very different than the needs that we have on League of Legends working in different engines so yes yes to all your questions please apply we all sit in the same area like we sit cross-disciplinary yeah so I sit beside one other animator but then I'm also sitting with QA with the tech artist with modeler with my concept artist with my effects artist we all sit together in the exact same area and have a stand a meeting every morning just to check in so nice nice we've got another question right here right my question is what do you do when other departments want something else when they feel like the animation kind of hinders gameplay or when do you say like oh we can't change it do you sacrifice animation quality or gameplay call quality I would I would put forth it's my personal opinion and I think I can't ness I would always sacrifice the animation quality for the gameplay quality because people are coming to leave the legends not to ogle it but to have fun and as soon as the gameplay stops feeling responsive then people aren't having a good time and there's certainly the eSport is not having a good time like there's there's a lot of things that are dependent upon the game blade being precise and awesome but I wouldn't necessarily think of it as like the animation quality is suffering but there is just a different problem that I need I have to provide a different solution to that problem so I think one of the biggest things for like if people are asking for something different is don't commit to an idea until you it's the right one so I try and block things in as fast as possible every day I still have a post-it on my monitor that says feedback early and feedback often because the sooner that you show eyes on it and get it to the right spot through iteration the less work you ultimately have lost a great question we got one right here hi I want to start by saying thank you for giving me this knowledge and everybody else here and the question that I wanted to ask is I believe for limb and it's about character concept design character design in general when do you kind of stop following so much what other people wanted of you and just wanted to chase what the concept that you wanted because when you were so showing the Evelynn concept I really liked a lot of the designs that weren't picked but you kept trying to want to weave it in and then eventually you kind of use the clothing in with the kind of cloak that she had on her and how did you kind of decide to keep something rather than just straight out throwing it away and kind of going your own way yeah that's really a good question so it's a beauty of compromise and to know like the range of compromise ation is also like it's having a healthy visual library in your head so you actually know the range of your choices because when you try to compromise you don't operate from zero or 100 you just don't choose that you can actually move the slider in detail so if I can't have the shadow clothing then I should actually express it to something else and what it makes them maybe I can still keep the shadow clothing it's just maybe the way how I execute them is like very flowy and Meiji so I just made them into sharp objects so that's actually how I communicate with it I still kept some of the idea but it's just like I was a to transform towards the goal excellent we've got a question right back here okay hi I really loved the section of the animation for Lana where you were discussing the read on her kissing the pumpkin and the small alteration that you made to tilt the chin so that it had a better read I was hoping you might be able to expand on a little bit more of what you might do as an animator kind of tweaking away from an overall look of an animation to to make it read better in game because I understand if you're looking at that post straight on she'd be tilting her head at like a 45 degree angle yeah it really depends on on what the ability or animation is you're trying to work out so for certain things like a character that has a hugely wide brim hat like having the luxury of saying you know what we're not gonna make this work from every angle we're gonna stick this thing in place so that you can see it and you can plate a camera and cheat a little bit more is really awesome ways on on making sure things read sometimes the answer is that it will look a little bit wacky but maybe your eye is not looking at the part that looks like a crazy smeary contortion of the body because the important thing is that you're seeing my hand cast this ability so even though my arm briefly grows three times in length you're looking at that hand and you know that there's a missile coming out of there so I think that understanding how you're breaking the silhouette and sculpting that silhouette to communicate the right ideas that is like the most important part so some like you don't want to hold on a frame where somebody looks totally off-balance and you're right if you look at that from another angle her whole body is like really facing upwards but you can move through those poses because there's a sense of momentum and maybe like the way that she's swinging out her other arm is is counterbalancing something if you are doing a crazy standard post this other arm follows through and your arm doesn't necessary I doesn't necessarily register there's no human way humanly possible way that this can happen so just really directing about directing the the players I with the most important information that you want to convey excellent we have another question right here hi everyone oh just don't say that it's a great talk I just got a question for Jason mother so the play for everyone so we kind of showcase the process of how you make the VFX right I was really curious ed do you get the animations first done or do you like draw a kind of trough of what you wonder the VFX look like and also does the concept kind of chimes in because like I'm really curious about that yeah so that's a great question about like order of work it really varies I know it's kind of a cop-out answer but so sometimes with like this ability it was a lot of back-and-forth we're like the twirl I mean I didn't even talk about this but like with the twirl that wasn't a thing like we're like is she gonna just stand there and like alternate hands or is she gonna like do a cartwheel or you know I don't know a headstand or something breakdancing who knows right it could be anything when we're starting and so we kind of get in a room together and we say well is she gonna twirl and is it going to be with her squeezer so you're gonna kick it or what and we just start figuring that out we start just like literally doing stick figures on the board and then we're like okay based on this information I think it's gonna be better to see her twirling at least like stuffed animation roughed out before I start my effects work right so that I have something to kind of like engage it too to just get something rough in there and again we try to iterate quickly like I said get feedback early and often so that it's just very crummy Freddy and we just keep it with us artists because if you show it to non artists who are like are gonna see that thing you'll be like what's weird like sometimes they have a hard time looking through the roughness of it and so we just do a tight loop on that other abilities where it's just like I don't know they get a shield you know I can start work on a shield without any character animation or even the model of Ilya even with just the concept of what colors the character is going to be I can start building a shield it's gonna look right because it's not connected to the character it just sits around them it's bubble around them so yeah it depends on the thing if it's highly collaborative we just make sure we it helps that we sit by each other and then it helps that we just you know question excellent we have another question right over here I think I'm talking to a cube now thank you I had a question for overall everyone when it comes to feedback do you have to like set a deadline or a time or somebody specifically or do you like talk among your like creative team or is it like just you finding that one certain someone that's like hey can you just check this out before this time this deadline so I could figure out if I need to tweak something or do you all just meet up in the room and just like all right let's roast this person let's fix this that's I definitely think all of the above because people do have a habit of getting sucked into their work like for the I can't speak for the animation discipline we do have every Wednesday morning is is animation review but then we also have like a pod review where the cross-disciplinary team is gonna look at everything and those are two like stamped down scheduled things but then we also have like oh my gosh look at this or you have like I'm frustrated does somebody come here or you have like hey I don't want to show anybody just yet can you sneak over here and check this out like there's every which way that you can get feedback there so that's yes so just speaking from a concept point of view because in industry you're gonna get this a lot because at least usually concept you don't only talk to your fellow concept peers but to people who doesn't even understand art like for instance like it had this character there's this guy was like I don't know I'm not feeling it it was like okay why it's like something's off I was like alright you have to give dig deeper Oh sigh okay what makes it off right it's like no maybe those horns like what makes those horns like off like you actually also just keep asking digging and sometimes it's not a national feedback sometimes oh it's useful feedback I never thought about that and it's usually like when you communicate to non artists it's all about how they and then bear with them they're there it's all good intention with the lack of artistic term they have they can get like it looks bad or I don't like it I don't feel it but you just have to like dig it up why why they don't like it and was it because of the color execution or maybe they're just not used to like you know frost behemoth looking like a dinosaur you know stuff like that right yeah like that's how I get to know if it's a national feedback or a really helpful feedback and sometimes like oh with all this long-winded feedback that they made it makes them not feel right it's just a one stroke away like I'll give you an example like for instance there's this there's this character it's a cat on the book you know I was like it's a cat in the book it's like doesn't feel right I was like what stressing fear it's just a cat on the book it's like oh no his face looks not right it's like was it just I just lift this I was like I'm good now you know it could be it could be like that from like I don't always think it's a table flipping moment because yes that's actually the first reaction of every new artist when they say I don't like it it felt like oh they don't like my work no I did I got this job or something so it's not that it's just like they're trying their intent is always good they just don't have enough vocabulary to explain it and it's usually a new artists because they don't ask for clarification on my feedback and then I come back and they've overhauled so much stuff and I was like oh no I was just thinking like little sparkles at it or something yeah and they spent all this time and I feel terrible I'm like all I need to do better but just like I think it comes with the territory as an artist you are a communicator that word was like up there in bold letters communication you communicate through your art visually but also I think you the sooner you can just embrace the fact that talking to people is a part of the job I know we went into art because we want to deal with fake characters and not real people but like because real people are scary every must be honest right conversations are scary and conversations especially where you disagree are challenging for someone as antisocial as me where I started it's been a journey it's all good it's been a really long journey but if you can embrace that and learn to accept that your employer will be so grateful to have you on board and you'll find yourself moving much easier through the company the better you are selling your ideas or even incorporating other people's ideas into your work as painlessly as possible to collaborate and be that kind of multiplier versus just someone who makes awesome art but then it's tricky to work with and so that's a that's a whole career of growth right there right everybody goes through it human beings are tough we're all very different in very different opinions but just accepting that early I watch people not accept that and it's painful they have a really hard time they're like I just want to draw drawings and it's like sorry the jobs more than that it really is and so yeah that's excellent answer sounds like communication and collaboration is key we've got another question right over here hello there I actually did have a two-parter but I'm just going to stick with one so I'm not the most hated person in the room I was curious about more about via the process of creating a character for your game because you already has such a massive roster and it's like it must be hard not to recycle the same ideas all the time anyway I'm ranting I just wanted to know because this has never happened to me before but like has anyone ever designed a character and then showed it and then boom yes everyone agrees that's the one it there's never like a second draft third draft 15,000 Thrive asking me if there's a character and see it and then boom I want this in a game yeah has it ever happened they're like well you or your apartment Highlands and it was my special champion cold not me so it's my first is my few years said I'm pretty new actually might be less than a year yeah it's I'm like new and then we did it we got this champion board and then we want pitch champions and I put a mermaid in there because if not me summer mate I was like oh you know like the ones in dota 2 doesn't count it's a it's an odd guy you know like it's I want an actual mermaid right so like yeah I just put it there and then it so happens like they needed some like a roster that's a water champion a healer and I like something different no longer like an old guy that's casting a spell kind of thing so it's like hey let's make this one you know so and I was like really when it was like right now it was like okay you say yes cuz like in my experience I tend to like lower down my expectations were like oh if they like my concept it's like I'm just gonna be like no after 2 years or 4 years and stuff like that but this one's like no it's just the right timing they need something right now and I happen to land all the qualities that they were that the character that they're looking for so yeah it is some challenges as well because like it's mermaid how is she there's no water enough water in the rift and then it was like no she can just like you know have a puddle and swim it's magic it's like okay alright but it sounds easy but that's that part is a real challenge convincing people and convincing you're like cross disciplines and that's one of the things like oh like different ways of convincing it's not just like grab them in the room and it's like hey I'm rich yes you have to be with me now it's not always like that but convincing convincing through like tack convincing to like art like tech artists yes I actually also even concept artists will be like hey hey like this is gonna work before I pitch it at least you're gonna tell me it's gonna work right like so yeah I I did my research and all the possibilities if how to make this fantasy work in a game with our current tools so it's like yeah like when Katie Did jinxes face mm-hmm that faced that crazy if you know jinx she's like our crazy person but she's like just that's psychotic like look in her eyes so intense that portrait I think you can find that image online yeah that original like everyone was just like yeah no brainer this is the champion you know so these days it usually goes through more of a process like this I think it's getting me find all the time but like back in the day would be like here's like a random drawing and then a designers like I will figure out a kit for that it's kind of how it was in the olden days ya know it's a little more yeah it's because the amount of characters that we have and pitching pitching can be exhausting especially when you're pitching on your own we usually pitch this champion again with with cross disciplines and we have like you know product managers that help us you know pitch it properly as well excellent question we've got another one right here for the hair and claw animation do the character inhibitors work on it or the effects animators we I would say most of the cloth is animator stuff but certain if cloth beckons for special effects like you saw those sort of tendrils from from Soraka that Kevin worked on those were on the effects side because they had like a lot of effects dependencies but they were there they were still represented in the rig and I do think they were animated elements of it that's one of those times where depending on what the effects are going for is it really starts getting blurry between these two disciplines about hair hair animation but we do there are like certain like it's not physics there's no physics in the in the riot engine but they do have there's lots of wonderful tools written out there that will sort of do procedural style things they don't work perfectly every time but you can kind of set the different bones to have a certain level of drag or elasticity to them that gives you at least like a base level for your animation and then you can kind of bake it down and refine it so not every Tabard is as much of a hassle is it needs to be excellent we have time for a couple of more questions you got one right here thank you all so much this has been really awesome this question is I think really for all of you if someone has been lucky enough to get their foot in the door in like a production coordinator role what would be your biggest piece of advice for advancing their career within riot for the production coordinator role any entry-level production coordinator please make our lives easier you know production can get jumbled and messed up really quick and that impacts morale and stress very quick and so a good producer if that's the track that you want to be on I think your focus ought to be on your team and keeping them happy and functioning efficiently and not burning out especially on a live product right as something we look for a particular because we don't have that big moment where we ship a game and then we take a big break afterwards and so it's important that the team feels available to take the needed time off that they're granted by the company to just decompress and then come back stronger and keep doing an awesome job over a sustaining period of time and this is like very selfish I'm speaking from a developer's mindset a producer would probably have a very different answer of all the other cool things that you also need to be able to do but I would say you know coming in identifying what on the team you can help with to make them run smoother and faster and get content out without burning out would be super valuable I think just a general sense of transparency like in my experience they'll be like lots of meetings that like people in production roles go to sort of on behalf of the team and like making sure that the information that is learned from these experiences is distilled with the group and vice versa so if things are decided with a group making sure that that information is taken to relevant parties that are outside of the group as well and just sort of being that that liaison for the different communications that aren't necessarily incredibly relevant to the like the animation work that I'm doing day to day but are relevant to the overall schedule for how things are going now the producer tanks so we can do DPS yeah yeah one more thing about their producer when I always talk to them that's gonna be helpful because like there are some different types of producer we're like oh they're very much into they're so used to handling engineers they're used to handling artists and they're used to handling like maybe publishing so the only difference here is like yeah I get to know the expertise as well like just be not I would say learn how to draw not like what I meant about is like a knowledge of jack-of-all-trades when you actually been located more working towards the artists at least you know like okay when the concept in this is in this face does it mean like does it take two hours like no you know it could be like a week or like it's just like it's all about timeline so what's good about producer connection with the developer is knowing an understanding like how it long how how long it takes to do an X because everything like every champion every product is different so just getting the fundamentals little bit knowledge and the fundamentals will already help as well excellent well I want to thank you guys so much for taking the time to come out so on behalf of nomen and Lenovo and Riot Games thank you so much let's give a huge round of applause the Riot Games are tuned thank you so much

Channel: Gnomon

Views: 214,517

Keywords: gnomon, gnomon school, gnomon college, vfx, visual effects, cg, cgi, computer generated graphics, computer generated, computer generated effects, animation, cg effects, game design, video games, modeling, 3d modeling, texturing, rendering, rigging, game development, mobile game, mobile gaming, mobile development, riot, riotgames, riotgame, games

Id: PUYBx1uGS7w

Length: 135min 47sec (8147 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ThatChescalatedQuick]

Neat

[u/ChelseaGrinder]

As a gamer with an artist gf that is not into league this is our program for this evening, thanks!