Dio's "The Big Sleep" GDC Adventure 2016

Post date: Mar 21, 2016 10:55:17 AM

Tuesday (Travel Day)

​Got in around 2 from my flight from Fort Lauderdale

On the plane I sat next to the mother of an animator that worked on games and is now working for Pixar

I hung out with a bunch of conference associates and registered for the conference in preparation for wednesday.

Met up with an alum as well.

Wednesday

Printed out some future dev cards for the Ringling booth.

Said hello to Emily Gabrian the head recruiter at Epic. She gave me some pro tips on gdc and my portfolio since it was my first time there.

I was pretty overwhelmed so I went around and scoped out the convention to get a sense of where everything was.

Then I went to PlayStation VR and tested out Playroom VR which was very interesting. There are 4 players one uses the headset then the others play with a controller. The one with the headset was a cute monster that has to chase the other 4 players. The one with the headset doesn't use the controller just his head movement. This was very cute and surprisingly fun and smooth.

After that I went to a local sushiritto place for lunch and decompressed a bit. Once I got back to the convention I was ready to do some more networking and I went straight to epics booth to talk to whoever made the sick Mclaren 570s.

Turns out his name was Jeremy Ernst and he was the lead technical animator at Epic.

We talked for a while then I showed him my Mclaren for crit and he was very impressed by the fact that I modeled all of it. Grabbed his business card and connected with him on LinkedIn.

After that I talked to a couple other devs regarding vr and nabbed their business cards to look them up later.

By the end of the convention day I went back to the Ringling booth and Rew introduced me to his friend Rob Spampinato the Vice President of HR at rockstar. We joked and bonded and got his card and connected with him on LinkedIn as well. He's bringing some artists to talk to us tomorrow which will be great.

As I'm writing this I'm in the line to get into epic after party which i actually have some high school friends in there as well apparently.

At the epic party we met a couple industry veterans and exchanged contact information.

Got some really good advice and ran into one of Rylands old friends at a random burger joint at 4AM. He was the senior software engineer at Riot Chris Laubach.

Thursday

First thing in the morning Ted Price was giving a sponsored talk. ​

After the talk by Ted Price I went to speak to him and meet him. Got along well and he'll most likely remember me and max. We talked about FutureDev then got in contact with the head of HR from insomniac which we are now opening conversation with.

After Insomniac I went by the ringling booth and met with a couple people that Rew introduced me to. One of their names was Mark Terrano CEO of Hidden Path Entertainment. Connected with him on LinkedIn and then went to go get some lunch.

After lunch I proceeded to go get some portfolio reviews. I nabbed one from High Voltage and another from tripwire. I connected with the artist from TripWire and by then it was almost the end of the day.

I nabbed one last portfolio review from the games for good booth. I was actually paired up with the Art Director from Riot Peet Cooper and he gave me an amazing portfolio review. Like with everyone else we exchanged contact information and added him on LinkedIn.

After the convention I ran into an old friend and Alum Josh. We were going to go get cigars

and what not. On the way there he was with Mike Calandra who is currently working on the witness and previously worked with Epic games. Unfortunately where we were getting cigars was not under 21 friendly so I had to spit from the group.

I Attempted to get into the Oculus party but it was very exclusive so that ended my day pretty early for some well needed rest.

Friday

So friday is the last day of the expo and the ones where the students come in as well. Its also the day after St.Patty’s so I would assume not everyone was feeling too great.

I Started my day off by heading to the Nvidia Booth and trying out all of their VR Stuff. I Tried Eve Valkyrie online with the oculus and Star Wars with the HTC Vive. After trying all three headsets I began to sense what niche each of the companies are leaning towards. Vive is higher end consumers that will most likely have the space for (THE AMAZING) experience. Oculus is almost the mid range headset for most versatility between platforms. Lastly playstation VR is attempting to target the widest audience which would be their user base.

After trying the VR Demos I went by the substance booth for a couple demos.

Christophe Desse one of the faces from Naughty Dog that I knew to be familiar was giving a demo on substance painter and the way the use it at naughty dog. This was extremely helpful and after his talk I Introduced myself. We talked about Jacob Norris for a bit and he gave me a portfolio review. I gave him my card and added him on LinkedIn.

I also sat in on another substance talked this time by a tech artist at Ubisoft Montreal which was also very useful. He actually used quixel megascans in combination with substance designer for a lot of the textures in the new rainbow 6. This pretty much wrapped the day up as I couldn't get into anything afterwards.

Overall GDC was an amazing and enlightening experience. It will definitely be worth the lack of sleep from the weeks to come.