Meet Mingquan “Charles” Zhou

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mingquan “Charles” Zhou.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Mingquan “Charles”. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
While studying animation technology in college in China, I learned Hollywood has the best film industry in the world. Los Angeles became my holy city. In 2009, I started my advanced animation studies at Academy of Art University in San Francisco. In 2012 at Siggraph, which is a world-renowned professional computer graphics conference and is held in LA every two years, I had interview at job fair with two supervisors from Digital Domain, one of the best post-production visual effects studios in Hollywood. I was very lucky to get my first job offer in my life at my first time to attend a job fair. A week after, I moved to the city where I always dream to.

The first half-year in my career was unexpected tough. I started in Technical Director department at Digital Domain, and Disney’s fantasy film Maleficent was my first show. Our department provides character-related tools and digital assets creation pipeline support for production. Things work so differently in the real world from what I had learned from school. There were many things I need to change and learn. I worked hard at my daytime, meanwhile, I was taking my master courses online and finishing my thesis project in my spare time. I only slept average 4-5 hours every day in that half-year. However, nothing could bring me more joy than working with my talented colleagues at Digital Domain. The valuable working experience made me forget all my physical exhaustion. In 2014, the movie released in theater. When I first time watched my name on a film credit list at end and also knowing my parents saw it in China, I felt everything was worth eventually.

Smooth sailing in real life does not happen. Digital Domain was struggling with their finance after global financial crisis of 2008. They were not able to sponsor my working visa, so I could not sign a new contract with them at end of Maleficent production. My supervisor at Digital Domain referred me to his ex-colleague at LAIKA, which is an Oregon based stop-motion feature animation studio. Feature animation is fascinating and stop-motion animation has even more unique enchantment. I accepted offer and moved to Oregon in 2014. I was creating digital character facial setup for feature animation “Kubo and the Two Strings” in Rapid Prototype department, where has the full pipeline from digital creation to 3D printing. I first time physically touched the digital art I created from computer. That was a wonderful feeling. Working at LAIKA is like living in a Legoland.

Life has a dramatic screenplay for me. After I left Digital Domain, my supervisors joined Method Studios, another visual effects studio in Santa Monica. I got their first invitation phone call on my first day at LAIKA. I thought they were just making a joke of me. In the following months, they occasionally touched base with me and talked about their plan of building a new team there. The more information I learned from them, the clearer I knew about myself what I truly wanted to do in my career. So, after my first contract ends with LAIKA, I decided to move back to Los Angeles and joined Method Studios.

I am very satisfied with the four years I spent at Method Studios. I felt I found family there and surrounded by talented and nice people. I learned a lot from them on both work and life. Meanwhile, studio sponsored my working visa so that I could devote myself to work. With the trust from our team, I participated many feature production and commercial production projects, include Ant-Man, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Avengers: Infinity War and Spider-Man: Homecoming. The work I was in charge of also slowly moved from my specific domain to more global area. I had chance to collaborate with more other departments and had a big picture of a feature production. I grew from a rookie to a senior technical artist at Method Studio.

Meanwhile, I was qualified to join Visual Effects Society (VES), the only organization representing the full breadth of visual effects practitioners. I have got many chances to attend VES events, met many new talented friends in the industry, and learned a lot of experiences from the talks. Life became more interesting and colorful after work in LA.

After years of working in visual effects industry at Hollywood, maybe because of my ups and downs, I realized my expectation to my career has been shifted. As a newbie, I was very proud to put my name on a big screen and dreamed to earn an Oscar movie credit. As I grew, I found the opportunity to work with talent and smart people can bring me more happiness and much more valuable experience than nailing down a big film title on my resume. And now, I become more independent, and I like advanced new things, and keep looking for more challenging work to improve myself and broaden my horizons.

I joined NVIDIA last year and moved to a brand new domain. I believe real-time technology powered by GPU will be the future. It will benefit to not only entertainment business but also many other industries, such as gaming, robots, auto-drive, healthcare, and so on. I am very glad to contribute my knowledge from film and visual effects domain to a new broader area at NVIDIA.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
There is certainly no smooth road.

First, as an international, language and culture are always the first wall, we need to climb over. They are very specific things in my daily life. At my work, this is not about English or religious belief, but more about how I can integrate into a team. Each team has its own language and culture. They are reflected by professional terminology the team is using, behavior each teammate usually has, also, the personality and attitude of each teammate. I have seen people in and out but not because they are lack of experience or talent. So, I do spend quite bit of time to know each person in the team and find what the team culture looks like, then try to adapt into it, be open and share my knowledge with the teammates, and become a team player. As a team, we all respect each other and do sacrifice for each other. I help you to help me. This is how we usually build up a good team chemistry.

Furthermore, where to get a formal working visa is an unavoidable problem to all internationals. Because of it, I made many decisions I do not want to make, gave up a job offer I always want, moved from one city to another and lived with a long-distance relationship for years. On the one hand, there were some nights I had struggles whether I should go back to my home country or maybe just choose a small studio without challenging but stable, which may make everything easier; On another hand, I always believe life is a journey that fulfills surprises. When I am young, I should always pick the hardest way to go. I accept the things I cannot change and courage myself to always try my best on everything I do. At the end, I leave no regret to myself on this journey.

Last, changing is always the hardest thing for me. Not only because I had experience to live in difference cities, work at difference companies and with different teams, but also everything in my industry is changing. Externally, the business model and business environment are altering. Over years, many works have been shifted oversea to where has cheaper labors. Marketing also becomes more globalized. More and more vendors jump into the same pool. Internally, new technology is boosting the industry to move to a new era. Traditional production is facing reformation. New production tools and methods lowers the bar and opens the door to more new young generations. I cannot change the environment, but I can change myself to fit into a new environment. As a veteran, I need quickly to adopt a new concept, catch up the trend of changing, and switch my skill gears. How to allocate time reasonably and study efficiently becomes the key. I am used to do multi-tasks, and I keep my habit to study a little by little after work every day over these years.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
NVIDIA is an accelerated computing technology company that designs graphics processing units (GPUs) for gaming and professional markets. Nowadays, our business is focusing on gaming, professional visualization, data centers, auto driving and artificial intelligence. In NVIDIA company culture, we are encouraged to look for the problem that is not easy to solve or has not been solved by anyone.

I am currently working as a Senior Technical Artist under Simulation Technology group at NVIDIA. Our group currently is working hard to build NVIDIA Omniverse Platform, which is a powerful, multi-GPU, real-time simulation and collaboration platform for 3D production pipelines based on Pixar’s Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX. Generally speaking, it is a Google Doc powered by AI for 3D.

With my years of visual effects feature movie and animation production experience, I fully understand the digital creation pipeline and workflow on both artist side and developer side. Having knowledge in both post imaging process workflow and real-time workflow is a valuable skill set on my position. My role is to be a communication bridge between front end professional users and back-end research scientists and developers at NVIDIA. I need to rapidly make a prototype to prove a concept, breakdown a complex problem into executable steps, and use my artistic eyes to guide and push our technology to achieve the high-end requires from our users. I am a team player and a catalyst in my team to make others’ work easier so that we can move faster to achieve our goal together.

What were you like growing up?
Not like the stereotypes of a Chinese family, my parents gave me a lot of freedom in my childhood. They never forced me to learn anything, instead they always supported my interests. At home, I like to read natural sciences and astronomical books, also I love to watch animation and read manga. At outside, I like play soccer with my friends. My parents took me traveled around a lot of places in China when I was a kid.

Due to my dad’s research needs, we had a PC at home. I started learning computer when I was eight years old. My father taught me some computer basic knowledge and programming, but PC games attracted me more at that age. I had learned a lot about computers from breaking things. When applying college, I had struggles to choose whether to go an animation school or a computer science school.

After studying oversea, now I like photography and like to travel around the world to meet different people and study their culture. I am a dog person, easy going and open-minded. I love animals, watch movies and enjoy the time surrounding by friends.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-omniverse-platform
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NVIDIA
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/nvidia

Image Credit:
Maleficent_Digital_Domain_Disney.jpg: “Maleficent” via Digital Domain/Disney, Doctor_Strange_Method_Studios_Marvel.jpg: “Doctor Strange” via Method Studios/Marvel, Avengers_Infinity_War_Method_Studios_Marvel.jpg: “Avengers: Infinity War” via Method Studios/Marvel, Captain_America_Civil_War_Method_Studios_Marvel.jpg: “Captain America: Civil War” via Method Studios/Marvel, NVIDIA_Misty_Conversational_AI.jpg: Misty via NVIDIA

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