Eugene Melnikov

// How I got into animation

I started in 2001 at an advertising studio that made 3D clips for the city's LED billboards. There were few of us, so I did everything myself - modeling, texturing, rigging, skinning, animation and putting the clip together. That's how I learned 3D end to end, from the first polygon to the finished video.

In 2006 I joined my first game company, Kenjitsu. At first I was a generalist there too, covering whatever the team was short of. Then one of the animators noticed I had a feel for animation and started giving me tasks and going through them with me. I got hooked, and I've worked as an animator ever since.

Several studios and many projects followed. Some of them needed rigging, skinning or cloth simulation alongside animation. When I didn't know something, I learned it and got the task done. Concept art and modeling aren't my field. Rigging, skinning and cloth I keep in mind as neighbouring parts of the same job: I may not know every corner of them, but I understand how they work.

// What I do now

I've been at Saber Interactive since 2011. My title is senior animator. For the last couple of years most of my time goes into leading a small team of outsource animators. The work isn't the most creative, but it carries a lot of responsibility - hand out tasks, explain what's needed, review, give feedback on time, and show management where we stand.

I still animate, though - selectively. I take on complex animation tasks that a lot depends on further down the line, and those that need more experience or knowledge of our internal processes. It's not a lack of trust in the team: I've simply worked inside our pipeline for a long time and do a lot of things in it myself. Larger volumes of work that are easy to hand off go to outsourcing.

To my own surprise, I found it interesting. And I found that leading people takes more than communication and a bit of psychology - it takes tools. You need to see who is busy with what right now and when they'll be free, so the next task is ready by then, and how the work is moving as a whole.

// Where these programs come from

There were no ready-made tools for this kind of work, so I started making my own. For the animators in my department - Maya scripts and plugins: loading and transferring animation, retiming scenes, mirroring, pickers, painting curves and poses, merging scenes, our own revision system. For myself as a lead - programs that connect Jira, Kitsu and Perforce and show in real time who is working on what, and RoadMapper, which shows how the whole project is moving.

I build them together with AI. I know where it hurts, what tool is needed and how it has to fit into the work. I explain that to the model, we build it together, and I test it on real tasks right away: something I extend, something I redo, and something works exactly right the first time.

Some of these tools turned out to be useful beyond our team. FramesCommander, for example, is now used by animators far outside our studio.

// Beyond work

Then the same thing started happening outside work. Everyday life is also short of small programs - for routine or for creative things. The ideas come on their own, and I build them. PictCommander is an image viewer with everything I missed in ACDSee and similar programs. TG Downloader keeps track of everything people send you in Telegram and can search across several chats at once. And RoadMapper is connected to my home projects too - it quietly keeps a record of what I did and when.

// About vibe coding

I'm not a programmer and don't pretend to be. The code is written by AI. But I don't like the idea that vibe coding means someone who can't do anything and learns nothing. To get a working program you have to understand the problem it solves, know the subject, and know how the pipeline it will live in is built. The model doesn't know any of that on its own - someone has to explain it.

And a good programmer who doesn't animate is unlikely to build a tool that feels right to an animator, unless they work closely with one. I'm an animator and I know what gets in the way; the model knows how to program it. This site is the result of that collaboration.

// Projects

Games I worked on - mostly as an animator, sometimes on rigging and skinning.