Widunder

Second post! Here we go! Coffee ready and album of choice this evening is ‘Septic Flesh – Communion’
Where was I.. Right! First real job in the industry! The title I would work was the expansion pack for World in Conflict, called Soviet Assault.

Massive Logo

So, in October 2008, when it was time for me to move down to Malmö and start my job at Massive Entertainment I moved in at my relatives place. They where kind enough to spare me some space in their apartment while I looked for a place of my own. I stayed with my cousin in his room. I had my computer with me and had a couch to sleep on. My cousin is a huge gamer himself, we had a great time.

My first day at Massive was very exciting and I was incredibly nervous. I didn’t really know what they would expect from me on my first day and I didn’t know what to expect from THEM on my first day.
When I arrived I was greeted by another Human Resources-lady. She told me there was going to be a morning meeting with everyone, something that they had every morning. So we went to the kitchen where I got a cup of coffee and got to meet the big boss of Massive Entertainment, Martin Walfisz. It was kind of intimidating meeting him as I had huge respect for his work. He was one of the guys that started Massive in 1997. One minute later the morning meeting started. Everyone gathered in the kitchen and listened to what Martin Walfisz and the producer had to say. They talked about what was going on at the moment with the company and if there were to be some big meetings. I also got to introduce myself to everyone. Talk about where I was from and what I had done. This was extremely embarrassing for me as I felt like a small fish among big sharks. But it went well I think and everyone welcomed me to the family, sort of.

Later, after the morning meeting, the Human Resources-lady showed me around the entire office of which where there at the time worked around 100 people. We sat down in a smaller meeting room and she told me about the company in general and about different things about being employed at Massive. Like working hours and perks etc. She then showed me to my desk and left me with the associate lead artist. He greeted me and showed me around once more introducing me to everyone in the art team.

Now it was time to get to work. I sat down at my desk and was told to setup my computer as I wished. Install stuff that I wanted to have installed and plug in my wacom, etc etc. This took basically all day as no programs was installed and there is always a lot of small things that you’re used to working with. To my great disappointment they had not yet got me a license for Maya, the main software I was going to use for work. But then I was told that I was going to mostly work in Lightwave anyways. This struck me as very odd, since they had told me the exact opposite at the interview. Oh well, no matter, I thought and asked what I was supposed to do as my first task. I was given some tanks that I got to animate. Animations such as fire-animations. Lightwave is a step backwards in 3d software from Maya, especially when it comes to animation, so I had a hard time adapting to everything that was different. The reason that they used this software still was that everything were exported to the game through Lightwave. The modellers used “Modo”, a great software indeed but there are no animation to speak of on there. So I was stuck with Lightwave.

After a couple of days I ran out of tasks to do. There was no assets to animate yet, as a lot of stuff was being built by the modellers and wasn’t ready to be rigged and animated. I was task-less for about 3 weeks, during which I spent all of my time learning more about Lightwave. Wathcing tutorials and trying to do different stuff. Finally I got a Maya license, and I was then told to try to rig an infantry unit and animate it. Just for practicing and keeping me busy, as this was nothing that was needed for the game. I did stuff like that for several weeks and it was then time for Christmas times. Massive was going to move to new offices during the holidays, so everybody got to pack down their stuff in boxes.

Massive Offices

A week later, fatter from all the foods from Christmas times, it was time to go back to work.
The Picture you can see above was the new building, 4 Massive floors, plus the entrance of course. My place was the window next farthest to the right, second window from the bottom.
The first day in the new offices we all just got to set up our work places and getting ready to work. It’s a great place with lots of space.

When I got to actually work on something I got to do animations for different stuff. Such as critters for different maps, airplanes duking it out in the sky on one map and a building collapsing. Also some character animation such as marines idling around a base at night. You can see some of this stuff in my demo reel at www.widunder.se.

WiC - Soviet Assault, the game I worked on

I had now worked for massive for about 4 months. My trial period was 6 months. And to be honest I had been feeling that something wasn’t right. I had this feeling of pressure in my stomach. I didn’t feel that I performed as well as I wanted to. Very much because of the limits of Lightwave, and how the pipeline allowed me to work with my animations. Yes, I had Maya, but everything had to go through Lightwave in the end. This was a complete nightmare. Curves was completetly restructured and parts of the animation could get incredibly fucked up when I exported an animation from Maya into Lightwave. These kinds of problems takes it’s toll, as the creativity I had died a little every time I had to redo something because of technical problems. I was almost never satisfied with the stuff I got into the game in the end. Another part of the problem was that I was on my own. I was the only animator in the team and nobody had a good grasp of the animation tools that were available.

When I had worked at Massive for 5 months, I had a meeting with the Art Director and my lead. Unfortunately, they told me they had to let me go. Because of several reasons. One was the the Art Director felt that I didn’t have the urge for quality that was needed, which was kind of true since I felt I couldn’t perform well under the circumstances given in terms of work flow with the software and technology. But two other big reasons was budget and no need for an animator at the time.
I was completely devastated about this, and felt like a total failure. I had no idea what I would do next and was about to give up on the game industry. But the day after, when the shock had settled down, I understood that one miss wasn’t much and I should just see this as an opportunity! I was eager as hell to get a new job, my career was only beginning.

End of Part 2!
Next part will be about me looking for a job and getting my second job. I choose to stop here as the post will be boringly long if I continue. Look forward to Part 3!