overseas labour - The Big Threat?
polycounter lvl 10
Hello there,
an 'industry' aquaintance of mine and I were talking about the 2d hand drawn animation industry and how at the peak of the genre or media in general, big companies started to ship parts of teh films/productions overseas for inbetweening. We kinda agree that the 2d animation industry has gone down hill ever since(exceptions are few and far..). Every hand drawn animation film with any sort of budget gets shipped overseas for most of the actual work past the concepting and keyframing. And really there are not many projects left. The work that is produced now is almost completely trash. nothing is, as it t'was. Can you imagine pursuing a career as a 2d animator? how difficult would that be? I mean 2d now MEANS flash animator...
When i was a young'un saturday morning was full, like 4 hours of non-stop high quality hand drawn 2d cartoon mayhem. fully animated, matte painted brilliance and spectacular... but now, uhh, watching the gas attendant change the price again across the street provides more action.
so my question to you guys is this: do you guys see this happening to the gaming industry? In the career guide 2008 i read some short blurbs on how a lot of assets get farmed overseas to cheap labour. We all obviously know about RMT's in MMO's... are they going to make our games, as well as overcamp our Notorious Mobs? then sell us the virtual money and items?! Do any of you work with assets coming from offshore asset creation companies? Do you feel this could do what some people suspect it did to teh 2d animation sector?
could you list some of the company names that create assets overseas? how big are they, who do they serve?
Thanks for any information, im pretty curious about this.
an 'industry' aquaintance of mine and I were talking about the 2d hand drawn animation industry and how at the peak of the genre or media in general, big companies started to ship parts of teh films/productions overseas for inbetweening. We kinda agree that the 2d animation industry has gone down hill ever since(exceptions are few and far..). Every hand drawn animation film with any sort of budget gets shipped overseas for most of the actual work past the concepting and keyframing. And really there are not many projects left. The work that is produced now is almost completely trash. nothing is, as it t'was. Can you imagine pursuing a career as a 2d animator? how difficult would that be? I mean 2d now MEANS flash animator...
When i was a young'un saturday morning was full, like 4 hours of non-stop high quality hand drawn 2d cartoon mayhem. fully animated, matte painted brilliance and spectacular... but now, uhh, watching the gas attendant change the price again across the street provides more action.
so my question to you guys is this: do you guys see this happening to the gaming industry? In the career guide 2008 i read some short blurbs on how a lot of assets get farmed overseas to cheap labour. We all obviously know about RMT's in MMO's... are they going to make our games, as well as overcamp our Notorious Mobs? then sell us the virtual money and items?! Do any of you work with assets coming from offshore asset creation companies? Do you feel this could do what some people suspect it did to teh 2d animation sector?
could you list some of the company names that create assets overseas? how big are they, who do they serve?
Thanks for any information, im pretty curious about this.
Replies
A bit of both. Companies don't need a large art staff all the time, so rather then hire and fire like they've done in the past, they outsource.
Save money on equipment, licenses and benefits and they don't have to leases on large buildings to house everyone for big pushes. It actually makes for a more stable industry, provided you have some talented artists working the assets over once they get them in.
With that said. We just finished bringing character creation back in house after outsourcing it. There is just so much we want to do and the quality varied so much even when we used the same company, it just makes sense to have somethings in house.
Another plus, they take all the crap you don't want to do and love you for it...
so you guys dont see it as a problem to have stuff outsourced really...ok, i guess Vig you bring up a good point. An important difference between the 2 formats, because the end product is realtime you can just 'fix' the asset if it doesnt match up to the company style sheets ect or whatever, and obviously every frame of ingame rendering would be fine.... where in 2d if something was wrong in the scene, the entire scene would need to be sent back and re-drawn...
hmm...
It makes a lot of sense, there are very talented people available in China for example who work for a fraction of the pay compared to American artists. With games budgets going well into tens of millions of dollars and less games make it into the green with each generation of platforms it is important to cut costs where possible.
Not to mention the heavy trend on photorealism makes it all more easy to outsource. All the assets for most games look almost the same anyways, kinda perfect for massproduction.
so far in my experience it is very good for characters, vehicles and props as long as the concepts and reference are strong enough. outsourcing levels though hasnt really worked in my experience and needed so much cleaning up and re-working because the outsourcing company really needs to understand the particular engine its running on and if thats in-house it makes it very difficult.
What happens to all the new emerging artist like myself who've trained at expensive institutions and are trying to break into the industry, only to have a potential job outsourced? Does outsourcing eliminate the essential entry level positions for local artists to begin gaining industry experience?
All the job posting I've require at least 2+ years of experience. There is not even one entry level position. I think this creates a serious problem.
Games keep getting so big and complex but they still have to get done in relatively the same amount of time, I don't see outsourcing as a threat.
All of the outsourcing we've done (in the past) has been within the US. The companies they contacted in Asia posed some pretty big problems, time zones and language barriers where too big hurdles they didn't want to jump over.
In case you're wondering...
The reason my company started to outsource was they lost their character guy and no one could step up and fill his shoes until 2 of us where hired. As soon as we put a plan together and forged a pipeline they where all too ready to bring it back. There are so many headaches that disappear when your in the same building.
Now if your a freelancer competing with overseas markets, get ready to be eating beanie weenies for a good long while if you're not cranking out the quality in record time.
All is fair in captilalism.
Really generally the quality of work you get back from cheap-o chinese/indian studios really is not worth the time and effort it takes your art team to work over. If you're sending all your lame crates and rocks and things no-one else wants to do overseas just because its cheap, in my experience, you'll end up spending more money having to rework those assets to be acceptable than you would have if you just had your onsite guys make it in the first place.
Really to me, outsourcing comes down to this: You can get "cheap", or you can get quality, theres plenty of studios and indivduals that will provide either, very rarely can you get them both at once. And most of the time if you can find just a couple really good, experienced artists to work with, you will be way better off than a team of 50 indian artists that work for the same price.
As far as the fear of losing your job to outsourcing, really like in all industries, especially anything related to technology this is mostly up to your own skill/ambition/experience/commitment etc. If you're just out of school, unable to separate yourself from the crowd then yes your job will likely be one of the first to go. This is the nature of business in nearly any field, not just games. If you can really push yourself, build up some great work and get a job, and not let yourself to become complacent and continue to always push yourself to get better, always stay on top of the latest technologies you'll be pretty well off. If you really put in the time and effort you shouldn't have nearly as much to worry about.
If you're really worried that some kid in china can produce the same quality asset that you can for ten cents on the dollar, what you should actually be more worried about is your own artistic abilities, and how you can improve them. Not some paranoid delusions about how the entire industry is going to be shipped overseas.
lol Have YOU ever tried inbetweening? :P I assure you, it's not very fun.
It's given to the early-level animators who aren't good enough to be trusted to do keys or even breakdowns. When I was doing 2-D animation, we all joked about paying the first years to do inbetweening for us :P Therefore, I'm not suprised that it got outsourced oversees, especially because it's not incredibly difficult to do.
However, yes, I do agree that 2-D and Sat morning cartoons aren't what they used to be. Although, you have to understand, a LOT of cartoons you watched when you were young were really not as well animated as you remember them to be. But that's the good thing about being a kid
Anyway, I know this isn't really what you were getting at with this post, but I felt like addressing it anyway
You make a valid point. I was under the impression that a lot of the work done overseas was actually pretty good from what I've seen from Chinese and Korean MMOs.
This practice really solidifies your technique for thick to thin lines to reveal perspective and weight, it teaches you maintaining proper construction especially, and much more im sure i am unaware of since I was never given the opportunity. I would give anything to go back and work through the ranks of an old animation studio. .....
I feel your opinion on inbetweens is even a little moot nowadays though. Have you seen what happened to inbetweens? they dont even exist anymore anyway.....I might be exaggerating here but it seems after anime came to america, people looked at the way it was created, fast moving backgrounds, single frames slowly panning, and thought, "hey I hate inbetweens", and "they come back crap from asia anyway", lets go ahead and remove them entirely....im not saying anime is crap, im saying we were inspired by the wrong parts...the parts that aloud us to shave off work.
i do see your point tho, if i did them for a year i would probably feel like a hired wrist to do the work of a janitor. Of course keyframing is the money shot, the artistic essence, ect, but without working up through the proper channels of education and jumping from school straight to keyframe only in flash, now with automated inbetweens, its no wonder the cartoons look the way they do. it takes time, lots of practice and youth to really train your eyes to do proper 2d animation, i believe.
"tween" algorithms just dont cut it when compared to what a human can get away with on paper. expert drawings by humans can trick the human eye, fake perspective ect, a computer has a very difficult time doing all that. its like we cant quantify it, we can just do it. So telling a computer how to do it is difficult for us. But how can we 'just do it'? training under a master and doing his inbetweens... you just eventually understand, without being told exactly -do this, then this and this. you absorb it by osmosis or something.
I love 3d animation and games, absolutely - I just dont want to see it absolutely squandered like that of traditional 2d animation. America became masters of 2d animation, then flushed it away, I dont claim to know how, but it happened, I dont want to see that again.
Thanks everyone for your thoughtful responses! this is a very interesting read, but ill stop the wall of text now.
I loved animating in school, I loved the feel of pencil on paper, I loved the feeling of the paper rolling in my hand as I went through drawing to drawing. The character would come alive in your hands, more so than I felt when I modeled some of my characters in 3d.
From my point of view, a lot of the 2d studios that went 3d only think that it's a natural progression, and that because it's the 'new' thing. The animation industry in north america is somewhat of a slow witted dinosaur for the most part. They are very slow to react to change, and the software is EXPENSIVE. Not counting flash, ink and paint software in the 90s was more expensive than max or maya licenses, even now the vector animation alternative to flash is still a piece of shit that is WAY over priced.
The only people in the industry making the money are the networks, producers and the software developers because there is no competition. They take advantage of passionate artists who are willing to go the extra mile for pay that's not even close to minimum wage. They reward silence and complacency with keeping you on the job. They punish initiative and outside the box thinking by talking shit about you behind closed doors, all the while the studio is willing to flip the bill to have the director flown to the city and still pay him close to a million bucks for a show he barely touches.
The people who make it are forced to crank it out as fast as they can to eek out a living.
It's sad.
Mind you, I'm just venting because I may have lived through such an ordeal.
Premium shows and studios make more, but the situation is pretty similar no matter where you go. Long hours, little reward because someone is taking the money.
I'm a huge fan of anime probably the only 2d animation industry that's still doing somewhat ok, I download fansubs, I also buy a lot... but I can see how the fansub community is killing the anime industry in japan. I feel even more for the animators over there cause they make less than we do over here and work longer hours. I just don't know what can be done to save the 2d world, the economics don't work anymore for the fast pace of today's world.
and back to the point, 3d doesn't really have too much to worry about at the moment, the level of quality and specialized work involved requires well trained people, artists feel that since it's so 'new' that it's a medium worth exploring for artistic merits. I don't think the 3d world will have too much to worry about for the time being.
As for it dying out... I'm a believer, or at least a hoper, that it is just the not 'in' thing right now. And as we know, trends go, but they also come back. I'd really like to think that it's only a matter or time before 3-D becomes a bit of a bore and suddenly 2-D stuff, like animation, makes a comeback! This might not be for quite a few years, and no, even still it will never be totally the same. Computers will inevitably share a huge part in the process. BUT, my hope remains that something of the original 2-D animating process comes back
Storytelling sort of died at disney in 2d, they decided that their audiences needed to have their hands held through the story, and they ended up following their rules too closely to the letter. Compare the animation from snow white or cinderella with animation from hercules and tell me I'm not seeing things when you can SPOT pose to pose cycles, it might has well been drawn by monkeys.
The last great 2d animated film from disney was emperor's new groove, which was out of the disney formula in terms of animation style. Seconded by maybe tarzan which had some pretty amazing visuals, but still failed to capture the life and nuance of the original movies from the 9 old men.
3D models never really connect with me in the same way as doing 2D animation until they're rigged and I can move them around. Maybe you're an animator at heart, how much 3D animation have you done. Personally I really like not having to deal with a lot of the in between-tedium and being able to adjust the timing and flow without causing massive re-work.
I think 2D animation is starting to die out because 3D is so flexible and its easier to train, hire and replace people. There have been some major advances in 2D animation that make it almost as easy, but with 3D taking more and more of the center stage its hard to buck the trend.
I don't have a grasp on how to animate in 3d yet, but I imagine that's just a factor of knowing the software. I'm flying solo by the seat of my pants at the company I'm at, so things are happening at a snail's pace.
I have rigged my test character and I played around with the animation tools, but I just haven't had time to sit down and learn them properly, but there's also the issue of knowing if I've even modeled and rigged it properly to animate it the way I will need it, so I'm having a serious chicken/egg dilemma in 3d where I discover in the rig it's not working quite right, I go back to fixing the model, rerig and try again, and I still wasn't sure if it's right or not when I stopped.
But in comparing modeling a character and drawing/designing them I just enjoy the tactile feel of pencil on paper, I feel a lot more connected with it. Then again my understanding of my drawing style grew exponentially when I tried to model it in 3d. So I really feel the 2 are hand in hand.
I really fell in love with character animation in my last year in school, and inbetweening was not as tedious as I imagined it because I would tend to straight ahead animate more than key to key. I would draw keys I think would be good, and in the process of straight ahead animating, I'd go beyond the key or go where I felt it should go. People who would strictly pose to pose animate hated inbetweening, but I used keys to help explore where I would go.
Anywho, PM or IM me anytime, I have a bunch of tips and tricks for creating character animations in 3dsmax, especailly lip sync. I know biped really well and use it and puppetshop at work all the time, I don't mind sharing the info, the world needs more animators out there
edit: and if anyone is wondering why I'm not just concentrating on animating... I want to learn the process enough such that if I do go back to animation, I can properly communicate back up the production chain if there is need. Too many times I see people trying to do a job when they can't even understand the thing they're working with can't do what they want o_o
lol Did I give that impression? Nono, I enjoyed learning and doing the entire process of 2-D animation. While yes, key-animating really was my favourite part, I loved having the entire experience. However, once our program become 3-D in our third year, I found I really enjoyed doing it on the computer too. And there was no inbetweening! lol Yeah that did make me happy... but I MISS the flow of flipping between key to key... -sigh-
In the long run it could be cheaper to outsource to good artists with track records so that you can guarantee quality and cut down on studio costs/insurance/team sizes- than go ultra cheap and get dodgy work that demoralizes your team.
What you dont want is great artists leaving your company because all they do is fix up other peoples crap instead of doing creative work.
Anyway, if anyones been hit by unoptimised or badly mapped outsourcing art gimme a mail- I seem to be specializing in revamping dody art right now