The Rigger's craft: creating toys for animators by bringing 3D characters and objects to life.
Michele Boldoni is Rigging Supervisor in Rainbow CGI and Lecturer in Rainbow Academy for a very long time now.
The intricacies of 3D work are not always easy to grasp; in particular, teaching the Rigger's craft is complicated to explain, especially to those who have never dealt with the 3D world. Cohy did your passion come about?
Hi, I'm going to surprise you but I am neither a super nerd fan of superheroes or comic books, nor even one who runs to the first viewing of a super mega galactic blockbuster movie.
I fell in love, a little less than twenty years ago, with Pixar's animated shorts and features, which are not movies, but pure art.
The falling in love happened after trying, almost by accident, a 3D software (it was Maya 4.5, the gray and red one to be clear) during my second year of university.
My real luck was just that, finding a course that allowed me to study communication, but through the use of new media (Digital Communication at Città Studi UniMi).
I approached everything graphically that was starting to move towards 3D.
Virtual Graphics, Audio Design, Virtual Reality or Game Design, exams that then almost always involved making a project.
The most interesting thing was the free courses provided by the university, especially the 4 Maya modules after which I said to myself, "Okay, I figured out what I want to do in life. Using a 3D program to create. Now I will do everything to make this a reality."
After my dissertation, "Techniques for the Realization of Secondary Animations," for which I learned how to scrip MEL within a couple of months, thus began 3 years as a web designer that I used to be able to pay for 3D courses even though, honestly, the homemade studio is what gave me the most.
But those were different times. Without social and improvised phenomenon. "The Art of Rigging," "Skinning by Carlo Sansonetti" for example, were bibles for me.
It felt like reading tomes written by Jedi and watching their videos opened up a way available to a select few. In essence, Iroman for me is a movie, Wall-e is pure and simple poetry.
What have you been most passionate about in Rigging?
When you get into 3D, you have to know a little bit about everything. It's better. It's almost necessary if you want to work at certain levels.
Rigging is central to a pipeline, you're dealing with a little bit of everybody, and that's one of the aspects that I like the most even though at the same time it's the one that gets you a lot of different issues to solve and so it's easy to go crazy.
The choice was based solely on the amount of patience I had more than any other craft other than rigging.
In fact, as with any craft, I was simply better suited to rigging than animating or modeling or anything else. My aptitude decided that way, in short.
Rigging is a constant challenge, there are always new techniques to learn, new tools to scrip, solutions to try and test. I am like Mr. Wolf in a Pupl Fiction that never ends.
What do you think is the greatest difficulty in your work even years later, has anything changed?
The difficulty right now is that the market has become globalized and is therefore becoming saturated.
Until 5/6 years ago there were far fewer schools, imagine 15/20 years ago, if you wanted to do 3D you had to engage yourself and look for sources, tutorials, documents of all kinds that were useful to learn.
The net was essential because there was little but there was the real thing. Now it is all the opposite, on the net you can find everything written by everyone and you never know if the technique you are learning is good or not.
However, this craft is also becoming affordable for everyone because of the schools that now exist.
Finding work now is easier given the globalization of the market related to the 3D world. Now anyone can move to accept any offer, from Canada to Japan via any European state. The downside is shorter contracts and lower wages. This phenomenon, in my opinion, coincides with the massification of this profession.
If before one was "unique," now there is beginning to be any level available to the big film companies.
In Italy something is moving even though there is no union and this profession is not taken into consideration compared to the weight it has in the rest of the world.
However, economic credits coming from the state for the production of films or TV series have increased and this is a very important factor for the growth of animation studios in our country.
What I least understand is that in 2018, in Italy, at least 75% of people do not know this world and anyone thinks that by pressing magic buttons the computer creates the film by itself.
The animator is the one in the resorts, the one who makes structures (rigging) assembles stages or works in the shipyards, the modeler is a sculptor who makes crafts and the one who does the effects, well, that one uses fire and puts it in the films!
So we end up with only one pricipal cgi animation studio of a hundred people while, in London alone, the film industry reigns by employing dozens of companies exceeding 600/700 people who have better working and economic conditions.
Hope is the last to die, of course, but I believe that until business ideals change and there is a shake-up in the audiovisual world little will change in our "dear old" country. It is a pity because, as usual, "we," abroad, are always well regarded and hired as among the best in productivity, quality but, above all, problem solving.
What does a Rigging supervisor do?
Paradoxically, don't rigga! I have been rigging and running tasks, scripts, fixes for years. When you become a Supervisor you decide what everyone on your team has to do.
You decide what they have to do, how they have to do it and in how much time so as to ensure that production can run the "production chain." An operator performs predetermined tasks; the Supervisor designs everything that is predetermined for the operators. In addition, while "they" work, I create automatisms, programming in python, that make it possible to speed up certain rig-building processes so that everyone's work and thus the end result is faster, while maintaining the required quality.
In a nutshell, you take responsibility for everything in your department. You have meetings with other supervisors to decide all the pipeline and production workflow progress as well. The work is more mental, planning and controlling.
It can happen to work on multiple projects at the same time. It can also happen to talk to several people at the same time. Let's say that in the evening, after work is over, you are so exhausted that you can't even follow a movie on the couch at home!
What should a 3D Artist who wanted to specialize in rigging not miss?
Rigging is part of the MC (main content, asset creation) and not the LRC (Lighting, Rendering, compositing) phase. It would be good to have a good smattering of all the departments you work with.
I get the models from modeling, work in parallel with surfacing, and produce the rigs for the animators. A good knowledge of these other three departments is, for me, essential.
Rigging also means automation, to create rigs and proceduralize builds, but also to make animation tools. Maybe not strictly necessary when starting out, but a rigger should always know Python and MEL. The basics of programming in 3D.
We know that you are the author of the project Sushido short film home made with former colleagues and friends. How did this short film come about?
Sushido was born from a character made by "Doc" (Giovanni Dossena) a few years ago. I had the idea of making him animatable with a good rig and it would have been nice to have him do some martial arts so as to stress the rig and the model.
Then, as often happens, everyone took different paths, which in my case translated into different studios in different cities around the world. After I got to know Vincenzo De Cesaris (a student in Rainbow Academy's 3D Digital Production Master 's program where I teach rigging), I realized that he had the artistic potential to be able to create something by animating that very rig. So we came up with a little "situation"-story would be too specific and lengthy a term compared to what happens in the short film-and, as a result, I rounded up other friends, colleagues, and former colleagues willing to make that something that I only had in mind.
Sushido is a sought-after word whose meaning (reliable Japanese sources confirm this) is "the way to obtain sushi." To me, Sushido, represents the way to achieve what one seeks through meditation, concentration and fixation on a focused goal. And by using a Katana! A project created by a team of friends who work as professionals in the 3D industry, but actually enjoy creating animated shorts to make sense of their creativity.
This was also my first time at festivals. The short was also made to understand how products sent to festivals work. Not to win them but to understand the mechanism of publishing and sharing through real events and not just media. A lot of hard work, because the time was everyone's free time, nights or weekends, but also a lot of satisfaction when I was contacted by ADAF(AthensDigital Arts Festival) in Athens and also by FIFES(Film Festival of Laughter ) to be held in Tuškanac, Zagreb, Croatia.
This was my first time as a CG Sup and I must say that I learned a lot of things that I would never have been able to study on my own.
What advice do you give to the young people who are getting into this profession more and more?
Of never giving up, of always asking why, of not blaming the software even when it rains, of getting it wrong and then doing it again, getting it wrong again, getting mad and then doing it all over again.
This is not an easy profession and will never become one. So, only advice, without passion for this work you will go nowhere. Ask yourself the question, "Would I spend 16 hours straight talking about 3D techniques, plugins and scripts with eagerness and interest?" and you will understand if you are made for this job.
Personal Site:
micheleboldoni.com
SUSHIDO Backstage:
https://sushidoblog.wordpress.com/
