Markdown Wrapup

A while back I blogged about how much I longed for a good Markdown based blogging platform. Since a couple of people inquired about how that’s gone, I thought I’d mention my (meager) findings since then.

You kids get offa my lawn!

I didn't get a chance to go to the GDC panel on ageism this year, but it's definitely a topic that I've thought about a lot as I've gradually metamorphosed into an  old codger.  Seeing the panel and related articles reminded me of one of the very first columns I wrote for Game Developer, all the way back in 2004 when my back didn't make those bizarre noises every time I bend over.

Some of the observations here are a bit dated -- most notably, the article is pretty optimistic about the options for climbing the corporate ladder, since it was written at a time when team sizes and big mega-game-conglomerates were growing instead of looking increasingly rare.  However the problems seem to be very much alive today.  As somebody with very talented and accomplished friends who've fallen off the industry tightrope in their 40's and early 50's I can attest that the problems are real.

Site updates

I've finally gotten around to re-hosting the slides from the Character Rigger's Cookbook talk.  You can also get the original audio on the GDC Vault.

For the tiny handfull of you how were using my Unity course notes, I'm in the process of moving them to a new host.  So the old link at theodox.com is no longer correct (if you follow it you'll get a work-in-progress page; I'm experimenting with a cool new markdown based wiki that is much nicer than the old one at tryscribble.com, but I have yet to make 'real' pages).  I'll announce it here when they go live again.

While moving things around I also added redirect so you can find this blog at blog.theodox.com as well as the usual blogspot link. 

Back from GDC

Another year, and another horde of game developers have washed over the Mosconce Center like a tidal wave leaving devastation, half-eaten Peruvian chicken sandwiches, and flyers for UE4 in their wake.

hot times on the hiring floor this year!

This was a pretty upbeat year at the show. It was big -- numbers aren't final yet but it looks like the biggest one yet -- and buzzing: the show floor and (perhaps more interesting to the crowd here) the hiring floor were pretty busy. For an old GDC vet it was still a bit of an odd scene on the jobs floor -- the titans of old (EA, Blizzard, Sony, and Microsoft) no longer dominate the space with huge booths and long lines of art school kids -- the biggest booth was from wargaming.net and the busiest ones were hiring for things like VR or even SpaceX (by the way, that rumor I've heard about SpaceX hiring tech artists is not true, at least not according to the folks at the booth this year).  The job market for TA's looks to be pretty hot too: there were a lot of people in the TA roundtable looking to hire. Of course, everybody want to hire "senior" TAs, which is a tough thing for the less-senior to contemplate. Much discussion of how to get people from the entry level to the big leagues, I think there's a future post in there somewhere.
A different kind of change is the vastly expanded demographics of the show -- it's a much bigger, more diverse and more interesting set of faces than you used to see back in the day. The tech art round tables (thanks as always to +Jeff Hanna  for that pillar of the community) had a great mix of people and good questions from all over. Even the dinner at Bucca's had lost a bit of it's pallor, at least until the end when the bottle of chianti and 6 pound calamari plate had circled the table one too many times.
Here's a few things that stuck out to me at the show:

• the TA Bootcamp was bigger and more badass than ever. We're not afraid to tackle the controversial subjects, from a rigging system in Max to processing budget reports! By all means check out the bootcamp sessions on the GDC vault(link) when they go up in a month or so.
• the animation bootcamp has also grown into a big treasure trove of great information. If your job involves supporting animation, you should check it out and make sure you know what the animators care about when they aren't whining about where you put the sliders or the shape of your nurbs handles.
• PBR Rendering has definitely become ubiquitious -- now that Unity, UE, Crytek and Stingray are all offering PBR it's going to be the AAA standard in a year or two if it's not already. I suspect that mobile will stay with conventional forward-rendered shaders for a while yet -- Marmoset's Skyshop(link) is beautiful and all but it labors to render a single model at speed on my iPad -- but I would not be suprised to see cheap-ass versions of the PBR workflow being ported back to mobile either. Start getting ready to pronounce 'metallicity' a lot, and while you're at it check out the talks from Certain Affinity at the TA bootcamp on their PBR pipeline, as well as last year's Order 1886 rendering talk.
• Almost as can't-swing-a-dead-cat common as PBR was Substance from Allegorithmic. Lots of sightings in talks and in various booths around the show floor. One thing I picked up from their sponsored talk: the batch tools in Substance are python-scriptable, and include notification callbacks for things like texture changes: this could be a very useful trick for the perennially unkempt fringes of the pipeline. I expect I'll have a blog post on this one in the near future once I learn what's going on (or, more characteristically, before I learn what's going on).
• I think a lot of TA's will find some value in this book from David Lightbown:
  
  
   His talk was great, with insights into many of the things we often get backwards in tool development.
• VR, VR, VR.  Yadda yadda. I'm not jaded, just a little motion sick.  Although that will all be better once I get a virtual nose.  Bootcamp FTW!

About the only disappointing thing about the show was the lack of really stunning tech talks (fair disclaimer: between meetings and checking out talks I helped out with, I didn't see as many talks as I'd have liked to). The only graphics talk I found really compelling was from Q-Games on their bizarro Stalinist platformer The Tomorrow Children.


The renderer does some really interesting non-standard tricks. It's got a real-time 3-bounce GI system, using a hardware voxel representation of the world -- I think even the Enlighten middleware (used in Battlefield, for example) only does a single bounce. They also use what seems like a volumetric method for doing sub-surface scattering that does an amazing job for things like icebergs and waxy surfaces: unlike all the conventional screen space tricks it renders the effects of light sources (including indirect sources) behind a surface. The techniques looked hellaciously complicated, but the results were pretty impressive and visually unique.

I'm sure I'll come up with some more stuff as I sort through my notes, but there's a quick set of expressions from a great show. Hope to see you all there next year!

GDC on the horizon

For folks who'll be attending GDC this year, I'll be doing a talk on Technical Art for Art Directors  at the Art Director's bootcamp on Monday at 2:15.  Hope to see some of you there!

Update- almost there! 303 south hallI believe.

Poll tax

I'm experimenting with Blogger's (not super impressive) poll support. So please check out the poll on ScriptCtx on the right hand side of the page. If the survey produces good results I'll do more as way of getting more sense of what the community is doing out there....

What The...?

Like many Maya heads I have long wrestled with the problem of filtering lists to get what I'm interested in.  You're probably familiar with the use of  the type flag in cmds.ls() to filter on types: for example this will give you only the transforms in your current selection:

cmds.ls(sl=True, type = 'transform')

This works for any node type (the list is quite long: it's basically the whole maya node class hierarchy) and is a handy way to 

However I just noticed today that this works a little for component selections as well.  For some reason Maya 2014+ seems to treat faces, edges and vertices as if they were nodes of a "float3" type (uv's are "float2"s) .  This means you can get the components from a mixed selection with:

cmds.ls(sl=True, type = 'float3')  

Not the most earth-shattering discovery of the 21st century, but handy nonetheless.