Month: November 2025

When it comes to roles, my target positions are rigger or 3D modeler.

A rigger’s job is relatively complex. Besides pure rigging work, it’s sometimes combined with motion capture tasks. A large number of realistic or semi-realistic game companies use motion capture to improve animation production efficiency.

Take Papergames’ “Love and Deepspace”（《恋与深空》）as an example. The rigger’s job expands from simple skeleton creation to things like: cleaning, optimizing and fixing mocap data; adapting mocap data to characters with different proportions; combining physics simulation with mocap; and so on. Riggers also need to work closely with the motion capture tech team, animators, tech artists, and other roles to keep the whole production pipeline running smoothly.

Compared with traditional 3D game animation, mocap-based animation is actually even more troublesome, because after using mocap, the animations still need a final round of polishing and fixes. For a game of that scale, every single step is tedious to a level that’s hard to imagine. On the plus side, though, the team size, budget, equipment and other resources are also relatively abundant.

In comparison, a modeler’s job is simpler, but the competition is also fiercer, because modeling is the most basic, lowest-barrier role in 3D. If I look at it from the perspective of how hard it is to get a job, similar roles like level designer or environment artist might actually fit me better.

That said, a modeler’s work is not limited to 3D game studios. Many visual novel studios, 2D game teams, and even film and advertising companies all use 3D to help build scenes.

Aside from these two directions, I might also consider combining my undergraduate major with my future career. My bachelor’s degree was in industrial design, so from that angle, working in the advertising department of a product design company would be a great fit for me. I’m very familiar with how to present and promote products, and I’ve basically already mastered the 3D skills needed to make product promo videos.

That’s roughly how I’m thinking about my target roles.

Reference

Character Rigger Job Description: Salary, Skills & Career Paths

《恋与深空》首次深度技术分享：这可能是叠纸最「掏心掏肺」的一次

After deciding on a general career direction, the next very practical question is: where should I start my career?

Right now, my plan is to go back to Shenzhen for work after graduation.

First of all, Shenzhen has a series of support policies for fresh graduates, including things like entrepreneurship, housing, and household registration. From the perspective of someone who has lived in many different cities, I feel Shenzhen is a very young and energetic place. China’s biggest game company, Tencent, also has its headquarters there.

Of course, besides Tencent, the Nanshan District of Shenzhen is home to all kinds of big and small game studios. I hope that in such a place, close to the core of the industry, I can quickly absorb mature development experience and make the transition from student to professional.

Working at a small company is also appealing in its own way, but my first choice is still Tencent. In recent years, Tencent has been pushing the “Bamboo Shoot Program” (“春笋计划”), setting up lots of small studios to incubate innovative projects. Joining one of these teams is my goal.

Their recent game “Lili’s Tiny Kingdom”（《粒粒的小人国》）has a style I’m very good at. I could work in that kind of team as a 3D modeler or animator.

“Lili’s Tiny Kingdom”

Besides “Lili’s Tiny Kingdom”, many other Chinese companies have released PVs for similar 3D casual games this year, which was a pleasant surprise for me. Before this, realistic “next-gen” style was generally the mainstream in China. I even spent some time learning ZBrush sculpting because of that. Fortunately, now I have more options that better fit my strengths.

Between realism and full-on cartoon style, there’s another company whose style I really like: Papergames (叠纸).

“Infinity Nikki”

Papergames’ “Infinity Nikki” was developed using UE5, which I’m familiar with. Also, their environment artist positions are among the few that explicitly welcome Blender users. If we only talk about software, Papergames is probably the company that best matches my skill set.

That’s roughly how I’m thinking about cities and companies for my future job.

Reference

12 Measures to Support Employment and Entrepreneurship for Hong Kong and Macao Youth in Qianhai – 深圳市前海深港现代服务业合作区管理局网站

According to the news, Tencent plans to formulate a “spring bamboo shoot plan” and will increase the incubation of vertical games – laitimes

《粒粒的小人国》官方网站-小人国生活模拟治愈新作

Infinity Nikki Official Website – Side by side, the world unfolds in beauty

Working on 3D games has always been my goal.

At the beginning, my dream was to join an indie game team. To move toward that, I once took part in a GameJam and teamed up with four classmates to form a temporary dev team. Our goal was to make a rough game demo within 24 hours.

Although the atmosphere at first was great, things unfortunately didn’t go very smoothly. The biggest problem was that we overestimated how much work we could finish in 24 hours. We gave our game a huge worldbuilding setup and an overly long timeline, so in the end the game we made could barely express what we originally had in mind.

Photos from Game Playtests

After that experience, I realized just how much work it takes to make a game. It was far beyond what I had imagined at first. I could of course consider switching to 2D or text-based games, but it’s obvious those directions don’t really match the skills I’ve been developing over the years.

After that, I wanted to dig deeper into the actual pipeline of making a 3D game. During the GameJam, I was only in charge of art, and didn’t really get to understand the production side, especially programming. So a few months ago, I tried teaching myself UE5.

This round of learning focused on the art-related parts of game development: modeling, making textures, unwrapping UVs, rigging characters, creating collision bodies, making environment animations, and so on.

Screen recording of the game I made

The learning process was really fun, and I ended up with a pretty good final result. But it also helped me understand even more clearly how hard it is to make a 3D game all on your own. Because of that, I probably won’t consider becoming a independent game developer. Even if I form my own team one day, my first concern will be whether the game can actually be finished. Overly complex worldbuilding and overly long game’s playthrough are things I’ll definitely try to avoid.

All in all, after graduation I still plan to prioritize joining a big game company and becoming a “small screw” in a giant machine. A lot of people have told me that working on this kind of production line is boring, because individual creativity isn’t valued that much. But to me, there are plenty of people with good ideas, and the bigger a project gets, the harder it is to take every single person’s ideas into account. That kind of trade-off feels reasonable to me.

That’s roughly how my career goals have shifted over time.