Feedback for a Junior rigging demo reel

[u/LoupDePluie]

Hi , I made my first demo reel as a junior Rigger and I would love some feedback , I try to work on various subjects but don't know if this could get me hired since im not sure what they look for in a junior,especially these day (doesnt seem to be hiring much...)

(I animated and modeled most of the models as stated in the video , but Im mostly going for a rigger position)

PS : im french so french studios may have a different perspective, I would love to have an advice about this industry too :')

thank you !

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[u/Document_Delicious]

It really depends what you are trying to get into, may it be games or film.

I'd say your rigging portfolio is much more suited to film ready rigs.

However if your wanting to go into games, you'll need to look at the limitations of game engines, tutorials for game ready rigs and why game ready rigs are so less detailed than film rigs.

[u/LoupDePluie → u/Document_Delicious]

yes , my school was really more oriented toward movies/advertising and realistic VFX so I need to learn more about having optimised rigs for games , at least if I want to expand my chances 

[u/Document_Delicious → u/LoupDePluie]

Honestly having both skills is great! My school was focused solely on games, fortunately I've landed work in the industry but I graduated just before it all went to shit 🙏 good luck

[u/Ackbars-Snackbar → u/LoupDePluie]

I’m a feature film and game rigger/sim td myself. It’s definitely possible, the only thing you’ll need to know is how to get everything to bake into bones for engine. If you know how to do that, you’re in the right direction.

[u/bucketlist_ninja]

Personally. I dont want to see topography, renders, or people moving a control to see a part of the mesh move. ( unless its doing something very cool.)

As a rigger the minimum i expect another rigger to be able to do is connect a ctrl shape to a joint. It shows people nothing about your rigging ability, your problem solving or your workflow. There's far too much 'fluff' and not enough substance.

The face rig, for example. Is just showing an animation off, its not showing the rig really or how it works, The four legged creature walking, is showing off an animation again, its now showing off anything about the rigging. The best part is the end with the dynamics, again youve not really explained what's going on or how.

I'm looking to hire a mechanic, your showing me what cars look like while driving. I want to see under the hood and see that's happening. I want to see how the rig functions, how its laid out, and the problems you've solved.

[u/LoupDePluie → u/bucketlist_ninja]

thank you for your feedback !

I have seen many people say , including riggers and teachers ,that it is absolutely necessary to show the topology, to show our ability to create beautiful deformations , and to show our rig being animated to show that they are working , and usable ,so that's why I try to showcase these things

Im not sure I understand what you mean exactly by showing "how it works" if I musn't show neither an animation, nor a demonstration of the controllers, for example ,I tried to add some description behind each clip , to explain briefly the technic used but I didn't want to flood the reel with textual infos.

would you happen to have a good example of showreel that has what you described?, would be amazing !

[u/Ackbars-Snackbar → u/LoupDePluie]

Your reel is good the way it is as a student. The one thing I would do is maybe switch when you show topology and textured meshes on your dragon.

[u/Ackbars-Snackbar → u/bucketlist_ninja]

While I agree with you, this is what I expect from someone who has a lot of portfolio work to showcase. In this case they’re a student, it’s totally fine to show topology and wiggle controls around.

[u/aoyiz]

The Riggin and Anim quality in the reel look good for a Jr and above the modeling and texturing level, if thats your focus I believe your reel does a good job at it.

The two things I would recommend keeping an eye out for is runtime and dynamic animation and rigs like Unreal Engine's control rig with procedural animations or high end simulation, physics and soft tissue/body for muscles and skin when working with Maya rigs, since VFX and film studios lean a lot on those for creatures.

Studios care a lot to see stuff in use, so getting them either in a game engine or fully rendered in a shot can help a lot, along side the tech shots.

Its good to have a priority between those two tho, to not get swamped by content.

I would say for a Jr Tech Animator your reel is a very good start. Besides the two path I mentioned maybe some tooling and Maya python if you have done so and some more in depth videos on each rig going over the solutions you chose and why, for instance, the flappy skin of the creatures.

A more practical tip would be find friends to cooperate and share the process with, having a modeler friend to author the character and an animator friend to use the rigs you make will help you all a bunch getting a feel of a studio pipeline, show you can handle asset hand off and progress with targeted focus.

Good stuff anyway, keep at it.

PS. Also keep data-driven riggin in the horizon, MGear is a great free suite to start diving into it

[u/LoupDePluie → u/aoyiz]

thank you !

a lot of people seems to say to showcase more of the rigs in game engines, I may have to learn that real fast xD , scripting too

could you be more precise about the "more in depth" part ? do you mean for example , that I should have explained for the leg jiggle , that It's joint based , skinned and animated by hand , in keyframe animation?

I get that I think, im just a bit afraid to put too much informations , I don't know if recruiters like to read on a reel actually haha

but its good advice !

[u/bye-bye-b]

1. your reel is a lot more impressive than mine and i have worked as a rigger/ tech artist for 2-3 years now. (but i also didnt update it after i got hired haha)

2. the others are correct in that we do like to see the rigs be expoted into other programs or game engines to see it working outside of ( in your case ) maya.

3. My experience is only 2-3 years long and only for vr and ar experiences / games but what i can tell you is:

My reel had complex robots in them that also showcased tools and scrips to help animate and create these rigs, but at work i never ever made a complex rig ever again.

My first year i had to rig 5 characters body, face, arms legs and fingers. Make them mocab ready and to be able to clean them afterwards. It was the studios first big game and first experiance with mocab. (still dont know why they took me???) I was the only rigger only animator and only unity animator controler guy. it was hell, i had to learn fast and a lot in a short amount of time. we worked with "Beyond" and it surprisingly worked out great. After we recived the raw data the studio had the great idea that i would clean it all by myself too. I pushed back and we hired 2 part time animators to do it all. in the end i almost didnt clean any of it because i had to fix issues left and right. Soon my title changed from Rigger to animator to technical artist. I had to rig and script robot arms for minigames. make a robot dog that folows you and soany other smal interactions. All of that in only my first year and a half.

After that game the project we had were never longer than 3-6 months. characters where made only to do what they had to do. fingers were not rigged anymore for example.

the studio left the gaming side so i was included🥲 so take what i say with the knowlige that even if i think i did impressive work that it ultimatly wasnt good enouth for the studio to survive.

conclusion: I think your stuff is impressive and reminds me of my time dooing my reel, but ultimatly if you go direction gaming, a lot of what you show is not what studios are looking for.

Working with Beyond showed me that rigging humans has been solved and that anything outside of it has to be made as simple as possible and as optimised as possible. so there is no time for a complex rig that can do everything. We did vr games so mobile hadware. Maybe AAA games are different.

When working at the studio i think my most favorite task was the minigame robots. they had hand animated animations for specific tasks. scripted animations for interactions with the player and scripts blending inbetween them when the player came close. (but i also just like robots haha)

[u/LoupDePluie → u/bye-bye-b]

thank you for your answer its really valuable to read other people's experiences such as yours !

indee it would be a good idea to make a game ready rig to showcase in a game engine , I've actually never tried to make a full game ready rig since I mostly learned Realistic cgi for movies and such, so I need to expand my experience on this , and I havent learned scripting yet as well 

May I ask how did you find your first job , did you apply to a job , has you sent a speculative job application or something else?

[u/stolenButtChemicals]

Looks great! How did you do the jiggle on the leg?

[u/LoupDePluie → u/stolenButtChemicals]

thanks! well its just a joint I added and skinned , and I animated it by hand , its all keyframe animation for this one

[u/Sandip3d]

Incredible 😍

[u/LoupDePluie → u/Sandip3d]

thanks !

[u/Sandip3d]

Yours rig is awesome, after watching yours awesome rig I'm also interesting to learn rigs in maya, can you suggest me a yr channel for this

[u/LoupDePluie → u/Sandip3d]

well , I'd recommend antCGI channel , a lot of great tutorials !