This is where I get my kicks. Static objects are all very well, but when you see something move and twist and bend, it can be truly incredible when done right. It’s the difference between photo and video to me.

My day job is in FX. I specialize in pyro and rigid body destruction, but am always dying to learn more. The way to tell the difference between an animation task and an FX task, is really the level of complexity. That’s not saying that animators are less capable than FX artists.

Both require incredible amounts of skill and effort, but the difference is really that FX artists will attempt to engineer solutions to problems where the number of moving parts to an animation is too much for an animator to handle. So something like a building being broken apart is a prime example of this. It would be grossly inefficient to ask an animator to move around hundreds of thousands of pieces of geometry, but using bullet or other means, an FX artist can create a series of constraints to make the building crumble as desired. That’s really the difference between the two.

I’m a big nerd about this stuff, and I want to share as much as I can about it.

Stay tuned for more!