Megan Stewart, a senior at the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology (the Bass School) at The University of Texas at Dallas, secured a summer internship with video game giant Activision Blizzard.
Stewart is expecting to graduate with a BA in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication with a concentration in Animation and Games in the Spring. She will serve as a 3D character artist intern for Overwatch – a widely popular multiplayer first-person shooter game – in Blizzard’s headquarters in Irvine, CA throughout the summer.
Last Fall, Stewart served as the modeling and surfacing team lead of the student-produced animated short Bad Timing. Animation and Games professors Monika Salter and Peter McCord co-directed Bad Timing, which involved approx. 60 students throughout an 18-month production period.
An animation expert with 18 years of industry experience, Salter teaches various Animation and Games courses for the Bass School, such as Surfacing and Shading (ANGM 3312); the class where she met Stewart. Throughout the last two semesters, Salter also served as faculty supervisor for Stewart’s Senior Capstone project, which is an animated virtual reality experience, created along with several other Senior Animation and Games students.
“Megan is not only an artistically talented student, but also understands the technical aspects or the art and has the soft skills to be able to work with people,” Salter said. “For her Surfacing and Shading I final project, she went on and researched things that we didn’t teach in class to make her projects just that much better. I was excited when she applied to work on Bad Timing.”
Stewart moved from Las Vegas, NV, to join the Bass School’s Animation and Games program. Besides her involvement with UT Dallas, she served as a contractor for the Dallas-based computer animation and visual effects studio Reel FX throughout her time as a student.
The Bass School’s Communications Department spoke with Stewart about her internship and her time at UT Dallas. The interview below has been edited for clarity and length.
I was the lead modeling and surfacing artist for Bad Timing and that was super fun. There were a lot of characters, which I love making. We really got to experiment with different types of characters and different proportions and shapes.
The yearly student-produced animated short films, like Bad Timing, and the design of Animation Lab as a whole, really sets you up to learn what it is going to be like in the industry. When I worked on Bad Timing, we were working on the pipeline that we have set at the school. Around that same time, I got a contract job at Reel FX and their pipeline is almost identical to the one we have in class.
Dealing with the technical side of animation is one thing you learn to master here. But you also learn how to negotiate with your classmates and to give tasks to certain people. As a team lead, I made sure people were keeping up with their part and making sure you’re doing okay.
Through the Bad Timing production, we had to keep an open channel of communication with other departments, like animation, rigging, etc., to solve troubleshooting issues. This experience was really helpful and really useful going into the actual industry.
I found out about the Blizzard internship online through their website. I just applied like you would any job. I applied early on around the end of October and was offered the internship in January.
There was a big gap that I had no idea whether they were even still considering me, and it was really exciting when I got the call for an interview. It’s going to be a three-month-long internship where I’ll be working on 3D characters. I think I’m going to be working for Overwatch. And the cool thing is that whatever I’m making there will be able to actually be used in the game. I could be working on creating a character’s skin, or a hero’s weapon or something like that. And eventually, when it gets released, I will be able to play with what I worked on, which is super exciting and just crazy to think about.
I think working there will consist of using the same skills that I’ve learned here and building on them. They have different focuses that I can go on, like with the hero props or working on skins. But it’s really going to be adapting that into working for a game. So making sure that things have a low polygon count and that it runs efficiently in the game engine. And being able to apply what I know to what they use in the game, because there are things that I don’t know yet on how they specifically make things.
The moment I got it, I was on the phone with my mom when I got the call that I got the internship. So I was initially really nervous because it had been like two weeks after my interview and I hadn’t heard back. I was on the phone with my mom and was talking to her about feeling a little concerned and not knowing what’s going on. In the middle of the call, I got a call from Irvine, California and was like “Got to go. Blizzard’s calling.” I picked up and they told me I got the position and I was just ecstatic and I immediately texted my mom “Good news! No need to freak out.”
You just never know if someone’s going to like what you’ve worked on, and I just feel extremely grateful and extremely lucky.
I kind of knew I wanted to do this coming in.
I’ve grown up like loving all animated stuff. I was a huge on all Disney and Pixar movies. I just love the emotional ties and how they played the symbolization of a lot of things into the shapes of the characters, into the colors that you see throughout the whole film.
The more I worked on things at UT Dallas, the more I got into the game aspect. You get to play around with what you’re working on and you could see the fruits of your labor in the middle of the game, which is really exciting.
The animation and games pipelines are very intertwined and the crossover you get depends on the step of the process that you want to focus on. I’m focused on modeling and texturing, and within that you use a lot of the exact same concepts for both animation and games. I really think that you pick what you want to take care of, and whatever you find that you like will guide you down that path.
The professors are very focused on you and your growth. And not only that, but you have a community of people around you at the Bass School that all want the same goal, that are all striving for you and for yourself or your peers for everyone around you. And I really think it just builds a cohesive environment.
For my Capstone, a group of my student-colleagues and I are producing a virtual reality animation experience called “A Step Into The Paper Tower.” The VR animated short follows a wizard in his little papercraft world and through the experiments that he goes through.
When you put on the headset, you’ll get to witness an animated short happening all around you. You’re going to be inside the world of the virtual reality that we created. Our team built the entire environment and the entire room that you’re standing in. We created the characters that you’re going to see doing these actions all around you.
We’ve never done a project in virtual reality, so there’s been a lot of troubleshooting and a lot of figuring stuff out. But we’ve all done work for animated shorts and wanted to connect that with a new implementation of what we already have been doing. It’s really cool because the whole project has been very Innovative as well.
There’s about 14 students in our team, or maybe a few more. I’m one of the directors and working on modeling and surfacing, specifically for the characters for this project. We’ve run into some bumps along the way, because we’re trying out new technologies that we haven’t used in the past, such as using the motion-capture labs to get the basis of the animation. All these new techniques and all these new things that we’re trying are helping us stay on top of the innovations that the industry keeps throwing our way, and it’s been really exciting to see it coming together.
We have a couple of professors on this project with us. I know there’s Casey Johnson, Peter McCord, Monika Salter and Bryon Caldwell. They’ve all provided really great insight, especially because students who are tasked with specific aspects have chosen their Capstone faculty supervisors based on their focus. For example: the lighting artists are with McCord, for surfacing I’m with Salter, and stuff like that to really help give the specific insights that we need for the specific departments.
I really wanted to do a virtual reality animated short. That was the whole thing. I know I want to do this and I just need a team because one person cannot create as big of a project as we had hoped for. I went to some of my friends that I made in Bad Timing and we all came together through there, and then we just kept finding more people who filled the needed rolls that we still had.
I’m really excited for the end result at the Capstone celebration.
I really, honestly, would like to thank my professors and my family. My professors have really helped me grow as an artist, both in my confidence and in my skills, but also in who I am and what I’m doing. They have really helped push me. Professor Salter has really been a good support, especially in surfacing because that’s her focus. But she’s really helped me gain a critical eye for that and I really appreciate it.
And then my family has never doubted me for a second. They’ve always been there and they’ve always been able to assure me that what I’m doing is right. I’m not doing this for nothing and I’ve done everything I can, and that the cards will fall into place. It’s just working out great and I’m really excited!
Andrew Clarke contributed to this article.