Chandler Whalen- GDC

Post date: Mar 17, 2017 12:20:42 PM

* Flight in (Tuesday night), Feb 28th

On the way to GDC I met two interesting people. One was a fashion designer from LA, and the other was a GDC attendee on behalf of Amazon Lumberyard. The Lumberyard attendee told me about how he has been helping demo Lumberyard on YouTube and the pros/cons of Lumberyard compared to UE4 or cryengine. We spent six hours talking about how even after working on Lumberyard for so long, UE4 basically still has 'superior' blueprinting systems, but how he was grateful to take the time to explore more than one engine. Each engine has its own advantages, and he encouraged me to really test out some new ones, just for perspective at least.

Wednesday, March 1st

On the first day I explored the Expo floor, meeting with professionals from Google, Insomniac, Uber ADK, Koox, and more. Uber is currently developing a system of autonomous vehicles, and they need a general it's environment artist and programmer to help create a system of cars and pedestrians. Uber is still torn between UE4 and Unity, while Koox is all UE4. Whats interesting about them is that the system they are setting up is very similar to the system that Hoyt architecture in Sarasota created over the last few years.

I spoke with recruiters from each of their booths, then visited the Ringling booth. Teddy was there helping some people try out his game, and spoke with me a bit on how he tackled the challenge of VR.

The Ringling Alumni event took place that evening, where I got to see some graduates like Kevin and Bennett!! This was more social than anything, chatting with different people.

Thursday, March 2nd

Thursday was an inspirational day as far as technology goes. I went to a few sessions, but what stood out most was Autodesk's Creative Environment Demo. Below are some of the technological highlights of this system, which will undoubtedly take the market by storm over the next few years.

-Animation splines in real time

-Creating environments on the fly in real time VR

Obvious UX: Dont make a 2D HUD for VR, but rather use an embedded UI that you can always carry with you (like Fallouts pit boy).

Character path: you can grab the player and move them, and an animation spline path will follow them. Then on the knots you can change the anim pose on the fly. It established the overall scene choreography quickly and intuitively.

Animation stacking: when you place the knots on the splines, you can decide how long the pose will stay and then you can place another pose on top and it will do them sequentially.

Pose creation: super easy to grab the character at scale and pose him, then store those poses and use them in the character splines. It makes it super easy for non animators to convey the intent.

The tech is still in development. Currently there isn't and kind of IK, but you can make these rough animations in game and then export them to Maya and change it.

Composition exploration: SCALE IS SO FREAKING IMPORTANT. Even when you measure in real life, sometimes it doesn't feel right, so you need to adjust it.

When characters talks talk to you in VR you need to be sure that they are in a realistic and comfortable proximity. If they are too close they can make the player uncomfortable and step outside of bounds or just plain old uncomfortable

Things they wanted to change looking back/ postmortem: (AWESOME TO HEAR THEY ARE HUMAN TOO)

-Didn't prototype enough

-Scale and distance / ominous and creepy

-Tight production cycle and tiny team really good

-Prototyping reduced wasted polish

-Great ideas for more interactivity

-They should have play tested a lot more different endings

Future work:

-Spend more time in VR

-Improving sharing, things aren't running on the cloud yet

-Better game engine integration

-Character creation

--Particularly rigging in VR

KOOX Networking: Was invited to a party by a KOOX worker, where I met lots of programmers :D Many were far more advanced on the tech side of things, but most were not environment artists as well. They are Ubers competitor in the race for autonomous vehicles. LinkedIn with some recruiters there as well.

Friday:

On my last day I decided to attend a Nvidia talk with a totally misconceived notion as to what it was. When I got there, the speech started, and I realized I was way out of my depth. While I didn't understand everything these programmers were saying, I did catch the highlights as to Nvidias new Aftermath system. They've basically created a simple system that helps identify where exactly a crash in the GPU has occurred, and send bac classifications of crashes (what was causing the crash? Shader, texture, etc).

HTTPS://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-aftermath

What I learned: I have a ton to learn, and they were barely speaking English. HOWEVER, I understood more than I would've a year ago, so I'm on the right track. After that, I met back up with my group, and we went to experience the Power Rangers VR, some soft touch VR, and got some T's from Epic!

Saturday: I saw Russell on the plane! :D

My overall takeaway from GDC is really how to be better prepared for it next year and what to expect. Networking is good, but treating people like recruiters 24/7 is not. It's a massive event, so go with groups and keep in contact. Try to go to the talks (even if you only have an expo pass!) They let you into some of them. Relax. While it could be a job opportunity, if you're stressed the entire time about getting a job or impressing people, you're not going to have a good time and that's going to probably rub recruiters the wrong way anyways.