Training area of Pikatoons where the people in the office trains freshmen to be industry ready.
During the visit to an mainly arts studio called Pikatoons, we were asked 4 questions to find out.
- What is Pikatoons?
- What are any 2 of the softwares they use?
- How did the studio survive till now?
- How can anything we learnt in the visit be applied to real life?
Answering all the question in a review.
Pikatoons is a animation/asset making small company in China, Shanghai. The company specializes in creating assets for games, making animations for characters, creating game levels, and lots more. The company not only makes these assets and stuff for projects, they also trains fresh local interns to be industry ready. The picture above shows the interns learning the different feels they get when a character animates different. For example they analyze the difference between the running animation of an ordinary guy, and a ninja running while holding on to a sword.
As for the programs they use, they use many programs. The main programs they use would be MODO and 3D studio. Some other programs would be Photoshop, Unity, Z-Brush, and lots more.
The studio got its name from the character from the Pokemon series, Pikachu, and the fact that its a cartoon, Pikatoons was the final result. One of the reason why this studio is successful its cause it applies one of the concepts that was made by famous businessmen, like Steve Jobs- Make a system that runs by itself, a self running system. Pikatoons also takes the initiative to find available projects from all around the world, and try to get a place in these projects. The competition of studios similar to Pikatoons are fierce, they pretty much have to work on anything they can get at the start. After that, their hard work paid off as the people in the company got well known due to their work, and connections begun forming, leading to more work opportunities. This led to the success of Pikatoons.
What I can apply from this visit to my work as a game designer would be what one of the production managers of Pikatoons said. He started off as a nobody, what got him into the place he is at now would be his passion in his field of specialty (and luck played a part too of course). So apparently, he made an animated movie during his free time, and it got really famous. Things started to snowball uphill for him as opportunities started coming by and he became pretty well known, from just a single film he made, due to his passion.
So back to the question on what I can apply, what I think is to be successful, you must have the passion to do that something that you are interested in. Do not be afraid to show the world what you have done, publicity for your work in anyway will benefit your work, even if its bad publicity. Go to the depths of what you want to do, don't just create some half-assed work that looks like another ordinary piece, be creative, explore the unknown and put it into your work. Most importantly, don't give up before you even try. Try to at least finish a piece, and see how well it does. Hard work will pay off eventually.
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