Interview with Jonathan Simard
Hi could you tell us a bit about yourself?
Hi Ashish, my name is Jonathan Simard. I am born here in Quebec City in 1980 and I am 25 right now. I am an animator at Ubisoft for 3 years now and character modeler for past time. I always got interest in special effects in movie since I’m kid, but I finish in video game industry. I start working on Far Cry Instincts on Xbox and after that I switch to Assassin’s Creed. I was also a teacher for character modeling at NAD center during 4 sessions. I’m not anymore at Montreal because I transfer to Ubisoft Quebec.
What first got you started in 3D, are you self taught or taken some training?
I don’t really remember how 3d max was introduce to me, but I know that day I wanted to do 3D all my life. I take some training at the NAD center in Montreal, before that I was self taught, but I was just doing sphere with lots of reflection and boring box extrude alien with lens flare. 
So, you are a lead animator in Ubisoft, can you tell us more about this job?
 It’s not been a while I’m a Lead animator at Ubisoft so I can’t really talk about it, and this is my last week in Ubisoft. I decide to leave for personal reason and try new challenges. :-) I learned so much at Ubisoft Montreal and I worked with so many talented artists, it’s really a great place to evolve and meet talents that come around the world.
I can tell you about the animator job. First, it’s a lot of fun! A lot more FUN when you work on something as fabulous as Assassin’s creed! I won’t talk about the game, sorry, because I don’t thing Ubisoft would be happy. :0)
Animator and programmer work really together. Because animator do the animation (that must fit with other animation) and the programmer have to take all that and made it fluid between animation on screen. So it’s really a collaboration work. You have to experiment it to understand.
The animation is never done when I give it to the programmer and mostly It’s just pose and timing, because he have to try it in the engine and check if it’s working well. It’s always a pain in the a** to change all the timing when the animation is final and the lead have to give it a try with a controller to check if its playing well. When it’s all ok and the Lead approves it, it’s time to make it final.
Each day we know what we have to do because we’ve got a really tight schedule and every one have a character or behavior to animate. Every Monday we have a meeting to talk about the progress, what we are doing and if there is some priority.
You always choose 3dsmax and mental ray for your projects; can you tell us about this particular selection and why not other 3d packages like Maya, XSI etc?
 I work on max because I learned it during class and like I said, I was introducing with max. I didn’t switch to other package because I really like max, its easy to use and very user friendly. We are also working with it at the job. Character studio is a great tool for games animations. It has some bug, but overall it’s really great and quick.
For the renderer, it’s mostly because it’s in max now, so no plugins to add and you have the skin material, but you have to tweak it a lot. I also tried Vray and that works really good too.
Tell me about your new artwork called “Anneta” and “Killer No. 2”, from anywhere you have taken the inspiration?
That was easier for me to do these two pictures because they are “sequel” of mine two older pictures, Miss Burton (above) and The Killer (right). I like to choose not-to-common subject so for Anneta I was looking like miss burton, to make a whore but with an elegant feeling. I begin with a face design on paper and started modeling it. I didn’t draw the body, because I was too lazy. Shame on me because the first pass of the body was not really good so I start over again with no drawing again, and that was the good one. The same thing happen with Killer no 2, I delete the body and make a new one over again. I think sometime I have to make something bad, start over and get a better result.
A lot of my character are inspired by character I found on the net or people I saw in the subway (metro) in Montréal J. I don’t have any particular artist I prefer, but I admire artist like Fred Bastille, Peter Fendrik or Pascal Blanche. They are good source of inspiration and motivation.
Anneta
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