JESSE MCALISTER | TACTIC STUDIO | SENIOR CHARACTER ARTIST
Tactic Studio’s Senior Character Artist Jesse McAlister takes us behind the scenes of his work across blockbuster VFX, including Avatar: Fire and Ash, Men In Black and Midnight, Texas, as well as immersive VR experiences such as Chained: A Victorian Nightmare at Aaron Sims Creative. He shares his journey in 3D modelling, character art, VFX, WebAR at Tactic and modelling for 3D printing – and how these skills translate across film, immersive experiences and emerging digital worlds
Every creative career has an origin story. What first sparked your interest in 3D art and digital sculpting, and what were the key milestones that took you from aspiring artist to working professionally in visual effects?
Looking back, I think it all started with science and medical books I used to flip through just to admire the illustrations, especially the 3D sculpted cutaways of the human body and internal organs. I was fascinated by how things worked and how they were visualized. That fascination clicked into place when I started watching major sporting events and noticed the flash screens and animations between plays and quarters, showing 3D elements composited into real environments with tracking and effects. I thought that was awesome.
A friend of mine mentioned he was taking an animation class, and that conversation planted the seed. I ended up taking a bunch of classes covering animation, sculpting, and turning images 3D. After finishing at a junior college, I enrolled at Gnomon School of Visual Effects, and it completely changed the way I approached 3D. I realized how much more there was to learn, not just about the software, but about shape, anatomy, lighting, materials, and what it takes to actually create a finished piece of work.
Looking back at your early career, what were the biggest lessons you learned from those first studio roles, and how did they shape the artist you’ve become today?
One of the biggest lessons from my first studio role came when I was at a studio in Burbank. I was handed a laptop keyboard to down-res from a CAD file, and I ended up spending way more time on it than necessary.
“Looking back, that project taught me something important: not everything has to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough for what it’s being used for”.
Over the course of my career, I’ve learned there’s a time for hero shots and a time for background assets. Both need to look good, but the approach and level of polish can be drastically different depending on the shot’s purpose. If I could point to one thing studios often struggle with, it’s clearly communicating that distinction to artists. When an artist isn’t told how much time they actually have, they’ll naturally treat every asset like it needs infinite polish. Setting clear expectations upfront makes a huge difference in how efficiently and confidently people work.
Aaron Sims worked alongside industry legends including Steven Spielberg, Rick Baker, and Stan Winston before founding Aaron Sims Creative. What was it like working at a studio with that pedigree, and what did projects like Chained: A Victorian Nightmare VR, Men In Black and Midnight, Texas teach you about immersive, creature, concepting new characters and props design?
At Aaron Sims, I was fortunate enough to work alongside close friends who already had about a year of industry experience under their belts. When I got the chance to sculpt something from scratch, I received feedback not just from Aaron himself, but from my colleagues and project supervisors. Knowing I could rely on their notes meant a lot, especially given the caliber of work they’d already contributed to. The talent at ASC wasn’t only Aaron, it was the entire team around him. Being there gave me the confidence to take on new projects, and that confidence has carried through into everything I’ve worked on since.
“That experience also taught me a lot about building immersive environments and creatures with real narrative weight, because everything needs a story behind it. On Chained: A Victorian Nightmare, I got to really dig into what it meant to design for immersion, understanding how far a character or environment needs to be pushed to sell the experience”.
One of the pieces I worked on was actually the door knocker, the very first thing a user saw when they stepped into the experience. Something that small still needed to set the tone for everything that followed, so it had to feel heavy, ominous, and physically real before the user even crossed the threshold.
I also worked on the bedroom environment and the layout for the London flyover. That project taught me that a 3D model isn’t just geometry, it’s a piece of the overall artwork being created, and sometimes the smallest object in a scene carries the most weight in setting the mood.
Your time on the Avatar: Fire and Ash film at Lightstorm Entertainment placed you on one of the most ambitious VFX productions ever made. What was it like contributing to the sequels, and what aspects of the production pushed your skills the furthest?
Working on Avatar: Fire and Ash gave me a real, ground level understanding of how a full production operates. The most exciting part of contributing to the sequels was translating concept art for costumes and creatures into 3D, then seeing it come to life through motion capture in a fully built environment. That feeling is hard to put into words.
Some of the most rewarding moments came from getting feedback directly from Richie Baneham and Deb Scott, along with the project supervisors. It wasn’t just notes and revisions either; there were times I got genuine praise for capturing details that hadn’t even been fully fleshed out in the original artwork yet. More than a few times, a character needed blood, sand, grime, or algae that simply didn’t exist in the concept art. I’d take verbal direction from a director or supervisor and build it on the spot to make the shot work.
What really pushed my skills the furthest was learning to execute complex tasks within extremely tight timeframes. On previous projects, I felt like I had almost unlimited time to perfect something like a laptop keyboard for a hero shot. On Avatar, because of the cameras being used, every added detail, every bit of blood or grime, had to read clearly in camera. Being able to deliver that level of specificity for the directors, on a tight schedule, is what stretched my abilities the most.
The Avatar franchise is renowned for its incredibly high artistic and technical standards. What did work with Director James Cameron and the team teach you about collaboration, iteration, and striving for excellence?
There were plenty of times when a task would get passed to another artist, or when a piece of work would go through multiple rounds of notes, not just from the director, but from supervisors and sometimes from James Cameron himself. If something wasn’t right on the first attempt, you kept working at it until it was.
“One of the biggest things I learned was how important it is to understand the intention behind a note. When James wanted something very specific, the goal wasn’t just to make the change. It was to understand why it needed to be that way and make sure that intention carried through into the final 3D asset”.
I remember working on one of the Tulkun characters that was meant to be returning from a previous battle. The character had been brutally injured, including a missing eye, but the initial version of the eye cavity wasn’t communicating the severity of the injury. We went through multiple iterations, pushing the damage further and refining the details until it finally communicated what the shot needed and received approval.
At the same time, there was still a lot of creative freedom. Ideas could start in the art department, get translated into 3D, like the Nightwraith and then evolve through feedback and iteration. Being able to take something that was initially just a concept or direction and keep refining it until it worked for the film was a huge part of the experience. Getting approval on something that had gone through that process was always incredibly rewarding.
After years in feature film VFX, you transitioned into WebAR and immersive experiences with Tactic. What attracted you to augmented reality, and how different is the creative process compared with building assets for film?
One thing that really helped my transition into WebAR was already understanding what a stripped down asset needs to look like. In this space, a model can sometimes be reduced entirely to just a color map and shape while still accomplishing everything the client needs. Fortunately, working in pre-production for James Cameron gave me a head start, since we frequently used stripped down, down-rezzed models to keep our pipeline running smoothly. WebAR wasn’t quite as robust, but the core idea was the same, just taken a step further.
The exciting part of working in AR at Tactic was that I got to operate in a more creative capacity rather than a leadership role, which was different from my time at Lightstorm. Getting feedback quickly became essential to nailing what each client actually needed.
At its core, building assets for film and building assets for WebAR aren’t all that different. The real difference came down to timeline. At Lightstorm, assets were often needed almost immediately. At Tactic, there was more room to push creativity and fully optimize an asset before it shipped.
WebAR projects must often balance visual fidelity with real-time performance on mobile devices. How has that technical constraint changed the way you think about modelling, optimisation, and user experience?
What’s interesting about WebAR projects is that they don’t need baked normals or a super high-res hero asset. If anything, it’s the opposite. The geometry gets stripped down as much as possible, and the textures end up doing most of the heavy lifting. Optimization becomes critical.
Credit: Jesse McAlister and Tactic, an immersive experiences and experiential content studio: AR brand activation of 4-Hand-Dan, an Outlaw Snax character
At Lightstorm, on the other hand, assets needed to match the concept art precisely, both in color and in shape. There was very little room for shortcuts because the fidelity bar was set so high. WebAR flips that priority: performance comes first, and you build the visual language around what the engine and device can actually handle in real time.
Your portfolio spans entertainment, immersive technology, and creating 3D rendered models for physical products. What unique considerations come into play when a creating a digital asset becomes something people can hold, or interact with in the real world?
3D models are versatile. They can live in a movie, in a VR game, or get 3D printed into something you can hold. But there are two important things to keep in mind no matter which direction you’re going.
Credit – Jesse McAlister, Lightstorm Entertainment and Disney: McAlister created Avatar: Fire and Ash character poses as 3D printed props for a Disney retail project.
First, you have to build the asset exactly as it should exist. If you’re creating a high-res headdress covered in feathers, beads, and ornaments, it needs to be constructed with the same care and accuracy that a shop like Wētā Workshop would bring to a physical build. The only real difference with a physical product is that the process gets reversed. Instead of scanning or referencing something that already exists, you’re designing it in 3D space first, with the goal of eventually manufacturing it for practical use.
That’s the second key point: a digital asset built for manufacturing has to be treated as though it’s being created in the real world from the start. For 3D printing specifically, that means thinking about how the geometry breaks down for the printer, minimizing supports, and considering print speed and angles to get the cleanest possible result.
Having worked across CG films, VR and AR experiences, layout and product visualisation, where do you see the biggest opportunities for artists as these industries continue to converge?
The biggest opportunity for artists right now is looking beyond modeling and texturing and really understanding how things are made in the physical world. Take the Ash People from Avatar: Fire and Ash. It’s not enough to just sculpt and paint them. You need to understand what that ash is actually made of, or what the red paint is composed of. Is it shiny? Is it matte? How does light interact with it?
“That kind of material understanding is what separates a good 3D artist from a great one. The more you understand how something is physically made, the more convincingly you can recreate it digitally”.
If you could give one piece of advice to emerging 3D artists hoping to build a career that spans film, XR, and render and product creation, what skills or mindset would you encourage them to develop first?
If I had to name the most important skill to develop, it’s shape. You can look at a piece of concept art and see that Neytiri’s string top has a knot at the end and wraps underneath her arm, but understanding that shape means more than just replicating the silhouette. You need to understand the material it’s made from, how thick it is, how it falls, how it wraps.
It’s not just flat color. If you’re building an underwater creature, is its skin going to be reflective or rough? How does it need to render to actually match the approved artwork it’s based on? Understanding materials and understanding shape are probably the two most valuable skills an emerging 3D artist can develop.
At the end of the day, a huge part of this job is recreating something that already exists in someone else’s imagination. You’re working from a piece of artwork, and your job is to bring it into 3D in a way that stays true to what the original artist was trying to convey.
What are the main technologies and software you use and techniques you’ve acquired over the years that have built your skills for real-world applications?
Over the years I’ve relied heavily on ZBrush, Maya, and Substance Painter for the bulk of my work. Because so much of what I do centers on creature and character work, I’ve come to realize that the organic side of production demands the best tools available, and those three are my go to.
Credit – Jesse McAlister and Tactic Studio: 4-Hand-Dan 3D model. McAlister’s side business Top Layer for outdoor gear: 3D model to 3D finished product.
Substance Painter is especially important to me. It lets me build photorealistic textures and really break down the look and feel a creature needs to sell. Maya, on the other hand, is essentially the backbone of any production pipeline. Beyond modeling and UV work, it handles asset organization, rigging, and skinning, tying everything together across studio pipelines.
More recently, I’ve started using Nomad Sculpt for organic modeling, which has been great for quick sculpting sessions outside a traditional workstation. I’ve also moved into additive manufacturing, which introduced me to Fusion 360. That tool required a completely different way of thinking. It’s parametric and manufacturing-focused, a very different mindset from organic sculpting. Learning it has been valuable for physical product work, especially anything that actually needs to be manufactured rather than just rendered.
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