2014 GDC Takeaway

Post date: Mar 28, 2014 5:19:6 AM

Substance Painter is pretty rad. Well Substance Designer and Painter are both pretty rad. Programs made by the fine people over at Allegorithmic. I sat in on a few of their short talks on the floor. One talk was about the new texturing pipeline EA Dice is implementing using Allegorithmic’s products. The talk was given by the lead Tech Artist over there at EA Dice. Substance Designer basically streamlines the whole texturing process. Updating all textures, dynamically changing almost any aspect of the texture through a node based system is all impressive stuff. One of the coolest features of Substance Designer is a feature that checks the overall quality of your texture and visually tells you if you have any hotspots. If there are parts of your diffuse and spec that are clashing this feature will display there may be a problem area in one of your texture maps and help you get it to a good spot for the highest quality. Another talk I watched was on Substance Painter. That program is nuts. Brush stroke saves based on the camera, allow you to change uvs and even topology, update the mesh and your brush stroke remains in the same place. Particle based painting, what what? Say I want a rust drip painted along a dumpster. I can choose the rust drip particle brush (sliders available to adjust all sort of physics based settings) then paint along the dumpster and the particles will flow along the geometry, even the normal map, and act out how rust would drip down the side of metal. These particle brushes range from all sorts of wet substances to fire.  You can choose to paint on all layers at once, some, or none (diff, spec, normal, etc). You can also paint, with many different brushes, completely different materials onto the mesh. Another impressive thing is meshes don’t have to be insanely high poly to paint on. I happened to win an Indie License which includes Substance Designer, Painter, and a program called Bitmap2Material which I am not too familiar with. It has something to do with generating full (diff, spec, nrm) seamless tiling textures. Not sure how or the quality but I am definitely intrigued. I will be getting into these programs as soon as possible.

I met a ton of people at GDC. At first it was kind of intimidating meeting people already in the industry. Some people have this arrogance about them, which is very unbecoming and quite annoying. But after a few conversations it became easier to confidently talk about what I do and get past their smugness. The confidence helped me start throwing my information around and showing off my portfolio. It’s interesting to see people’s reactions to your work, negative and positive. It was fun to show stuff to fellow students and people looking for jobs, but the best feedback came from companies who were looking to hire and doing portfolio reviews. Although almost unanimously positive, the recruiters had great advice on how to improve, what to include, what not to include, etc. It’s interesting to see how different companies, even different people in the same company, have different views on the way a portfolio should be set up, contact sheets, what to include, etc. Overall most companies seemed pumped about the work floating around. It’s cool to see they’re excited to see emerging artist to push the industry standard further and further.

There was an insane amount of knowledge being thrown around all over the expo floor. I gained a lot from all of the live demos on the floor. Just picking up little tips and tricks in the programs we use every day from people in the industry. Every day I would swing by the Wacom booth and see what they had going on. I don’t recall exactly which day, maybe Thursday, a concept artist from Riot was giving a demo on character creation in ZBrush. He was just taking questions and talking his way through his process in ZBrush, starting from a ZSphere and building a character. And there were little demos like that all over the place. Just regular ole people sharing their brainbank of information.  It was all a really good learning experience. It gave me great insight to how things work in the industry, or whatever you want to call it.