GDC 2014 - Jacob Sumrow

Post date: Mar 28, 2014 1:0:22 AM

WOW was there a lot of stuff going on at GDC. It would be unreasonable to expect that I saw more than 10% of what was going on there. I was focussed on the talks and hadn't talked to nearly as many companies I would have liked but that is not to say I didn't learn anything.

Everyone wants something different. There is no avoiding this fact. Even if I only talked to a handful of companies, everyone was talking about what so and so company said about portfolio pieces X, Y, and Z. The joke on the plane back between myself and Picco was make something sci-fi at 300,000 tris for Cloud Imperium, bake that to a 50K model for Bungie, and bake that to a 5K model for anyone going mobile. Boss characters from 3D specifically came up a lot in portfolio reviews as either being way too high or not high enough for companies. Time to make twelve different portfolios. I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Interior designers and Environment Artists are actually pretty similar. This comes straight out of the first talk I went to. Dan Cox of Ubisoft Toronto spoke about watching interior design shows and implementing what he could borrow from them, because ultimately part of an interior designer's job is making the space easy to read and navigate in. We try to lead a player through a space in the same fashion. Make the intent of the space immediately recognizable. The form should inform the function. Dark floors rising to lighter walls and ceiling. I did not buy this one when he said it, I thought it was a silly thing I wasn't going to use but I figured "meh, why not?" and tried it on my current environment shots for DFA. And my shots felt easier to read and also a little less cramped as a result, and on Monday I sat in my chair mumbling, "why did that work? that should not have worked." One piece of advice he passed on from Interior designers that I haven't had a chance to try yet was "don't fight the architecture." In interior design this means working with the constraints of the building. Lowering a ceiling or demolishing a wall takes time and money, lots of it. So they take what architecture exists and use tricks to make it feel more the shape they want. Build trusses to give the illusion of lowering the ceiling. For Environment artists it would be the task of getting the art to feel the way the artist wants, while not changing the layout set by a designer. The gameplay is first, art second, but tricks can be used to get what we want.

Lastly is the idea of "bits" in modelling. This comes from Bungie's talk on creating custom characters for Destiny. They wanted a character customization method wherin they could regularly create many different sets of armor, and later create new content down the line. Instead of designing characters as a whole, they built them like lego bricks. The artists created a large set of "bits" that were small detail parts. the artists would take their bits and fuse them together into "arrangements" which would be a whole helmet or whole chestplate that a player may equip. and bits can be changed or their materials can be changed, and every arrangement that references that bit would receive that update. Now I'm not a character artist, but having a bunch of pieces of hard surface modelling that I can recombine into complex forms in multiple different objects and spaces seems like a pretty nice idea. May see frequent use in thesis, let's find out.