Jason Richardson

We recently released 3 different Aim based control rigs as part of QOOBIT's Control Rig Utility - Aim plugin targeted at cleaning up animations. These rigs provide different ways to adjust rotations through positional transforms of controls to more easily clean up animation curves rather than directly manipulating the controls. Take a look at how all three work and if you have other ideas on how to do tedious animation cleanups that you would like for us to turn into a tool, please let us know. Aim: https://lnkd.in/gSv9Kqiv Prop Aim: https://lnkd.in/gQYCjxRZ Tri Aim Pin: https://lnkd.in/ghkPZC3C PS: Since the release I've improved the UX even more than what are in these videos, so there should be even better handoffs when using the widget to better update the selection and UI context as you're using the tool, to reflect the live state of the control rigs.

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Ivan was the sole pipeline technical artist on the production. Export scripts stayed configured. Art assets dropped into the build without argument. Nothing shipped over budget and nothing crashed the game. He was first in every morning and last out every night, and the team read that as dedication rather than a costume change.   At any point in production, twenty to thirty artists were generating hundreds of assets. To wrangle that, we ran a three depot flow. Art sources and references lived in the art source depot. Intermediate exchange files, FBX and PNG textures, lived in the staging depot. Designers pulled from staging into the build depot, where the engine picked them up. The build always had the latest assets. Staging always had the correct ones, sitting exactly where they were supposed to be. No artist ever lost a source file.   Ivan also studied Polish. Whenever he had a free moment, a lesson was running, and walking past his cubicle meant hearing Polish read aloud.   "Why are you studying Polish, Ivan?" I asked him.   "I think it's a really cool language," he replied.   Not quite convinced, I asked him again a week later.   "I have a couple of cousins who speak Polish. I thought it would be cool to talk with them in their own language."   I gave him the benefit of the doubt, right up until he dropped the bomb.   "I've got a dream opportunity at CD Projekt Red," he said. "Once in a lifetime shot. I'm leaving in two weeks."   We hustled as hard as we could and got a brain dump on everything we knew he was doing. There was a great amount of material. It was only the tip of the iceberg.   Two weeks after he left, we started to see what the cape had been covering. Assets went missing. The ones that reached the build without blowing up arrived slow and unoptimized. Reconditioning the pipelines to carry the work Ivan had been carrying after hours took the team almost six months.   Transitional boundaries between depots without named owners are rarely unowned. They get claimed, informally and unpaid, by whoever is least willing to live with a broken build. That person carries responsibilities nobody wrote down, and nobody covers them the day the person leaves.   Game teams run on exceptional people performing everyday acts of super-heroics. They are simply intolerant of lost, broken, and unoptimized assets, and they will do whatever it takes to deliver, including saving the day when nobody is watching.   Certain heroics buy clean builds and hide invoice at extreme cost. Learn how to identify and fortify the boundaries that demand a superhero, before the cape walks out the door, in my new book, Technical Artist Pipelines and Workflows, releasing late fall 2026.   Who is quietly holding your pipeline together, and what happens the day they start studying Polish?

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