Andrew GalushaRigging Artist
Portrait of Andrew Galusha

Rigging artist for games and animation.

Latest credit: Smoke Break!, USC Games' award-winning 3D stealth puzzle game. My credited role was 3D Rigger, and I built the animation rigs for the factory machines that players interact with throughout the game. It is out now on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

I am an artist, filmmaker and gamer, and storytelling got me into all of it. It began with my closest friends and me making short, very low-budget films, which we still do today. Dramas, horror, action, sci-fi: as long as we had a story we wanted to share, we found a way to make it.

I started learning 3D animation in 2016, when I discovered Blender, and I was hooked right away. 3D opened up stories we could never film on our own, and I wanted to learn everything about it.

In high school, a friend and I started our school's animation club to share that interest and teach other students how to make animations of their own. Together, the club made short animated films for local film festivals.

The more I learned, the more I was drawn to the technical side of the pipeline, such as rigging and simulation. What inspires me most is building the tools and systems that other artists then use to create the art behind the story. That came together on Smoke Break!, where I planned each machine's motion range from its concept art, then built the rigs and their custom controllers with feedback from the animation team. Seeing those machines move in the finished game was incredible.

None of it happened alone. I do my best work as part of a team, and every team I have been on has shaped how I work. On Smoke Break!, that meant showing my work early and taking feedback openly, so every rig did what the animators needed it to do. I am grateful to the colleagues, professors and mentors I have learned from, and to the friends I have been telling stories with from the very beginning.

Outside of animation, I enjoy hiking, music and volunteering for my city. I also spend plenty of evenings playing Factorio, Minecraft, Rocket League, Overwatch and Project Zomboid with my friends.

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LinkedIn posts

  • Andrew at SIGGRAPH in a plaid shirt and an NVIDIA lanyard, standing beside Dell's humanoid robot, which wears a navy Dell Technologies T-shirt, on the exhibition floor
    Special thanks to Alvin Shi for telling me all about your incredible research with Professor Theodore Kim on curvature space editing of highly-coiled hair, definitely one of my favorite research papers presented this year at SIGGRAPH! The ability to have more artistic and creative direction over these hair types really expands the potential diversity of characters and styles we can feature across movies and games. Check out his amazing work here! https://lnkd.in/gybgjq7C Lots of cool hardware being shown off too, check out Dell’s robot pictured below. My favorite had to have been Framework’s booth showing off their latest laptop with LPCAMM2 memory and an incredibly user repairable design!
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  • Steam's All Games list, with Smoke Break! in the top row marked Free To Play, beside Holy Shoot and above three other games
    Smoke Break! hits the front page of Steam under the Free to Play category as the Game Devs of Color Expo kicks off today!
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  • Smoke Break! art: a red crocodile in a green cap and apron and Applewood, a gray puff of smoke, hold up a gold Collegiate Games Challenge trophy beside a pie as confetti falls
    Let’s gooo!!! Super thrilled to see how far our game has come and thank you to all the hard work from our leads who continue to support and promote the game at festivals and competitions!
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  • The Smoke Break! Official Trailer cover: the game's logo beside a baker in a chef's hat, crates of apples and Applewood drifting along a bakery counter
    Official trailer out now! Plus an Epic Games Store launch added alongside our Steam launch on May 13th!
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  • Smoke Break! art announcing that the game can be added to your wishlist on Steam, with Applewood, a gray puff of smoke, behind a green Add to Wishlist button
    It's been so much fun and quite a journey working as a 3D machine rigging artist for Smoke Break! It means so much to finally see it getting published on Steam. Awesome work everyone! It's crazy how much this game has transformed since I first joined the team as everyone has been putting in so much love, time, passion and skill into this incredible game.
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  • Andrew in an OptiTrack motion capture suit with reflective markers and a head-mounted phone rig, standing on a green-screen stage under studio lights
    Working with CSUF's new OptiTrack motion capture system here. We're super excited to be working alongside our performing arts majors to get some more performance mocap going next week!
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  • Tinky Winky from Teletubbies stomping beside a skyscraper that collapses into dust and debris in a Houdini destruction simulation
    Currently working on this for my capstone course, which I'm challenging myself to learn some of Houdini's systems for. One of my favorite ways to learn a new software is to just have fun, break things, find out a couple dozen different ways of how not to do something, but ultimately seeing a result start to resemble something that makes other people smile always makes it all worth it.
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  • The cover of Andrew's rig video: his Apple Slicer machine rig in Maya, a green and yellow machine with a pale blue pipe, a pink conveyor and blue control curves
    Last week I started my new position as a Machine Rigging Artist working on the exciting USC Games project Smoke Break! You can learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gPjbYE69 I'm super hyped for our game to be published on Steam in early March! It's been really fun play testing some of our early builds lately. Here's a rig I wrapped up this week for our game:
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  • Andrew's 3D sword prop: a steel blade bent in a zigzag that curves to a point, with a leather-wrapped handle, on a plain gray background
    Here's a sword prop I made for my 3D character sculpting class. I'll be posting the character that this prop goes to very soon, currently working on retopologizing the character at the moment. https://lnkd.in/gm7W3MvQ
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  • A night-time render of a desert gas station under the stars, where a figure in a red jacket stands in a beam of light from above beside power lines and a red-lit radio tower
    Here are some scenes I lit around a year and a half ago but went back to last week as I had recently learned how to use the ACES color management workflow and wanted to continue to practice my color grading and other post production skills.
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