GDC 2018 - Mayank Babbar

Post date: Apr 06, 2018 3:51:25 AM

This was my second GDC and I have to say I have experienced a lot more than I thought I would have. For starters, the technology for VR has evolved so much within a year that had me surprised. During my exploring at GDC, I had also learned plenty of ways to make connections with recruiters as well as others in our industry. I will explain my experiences in detail below.

Monday.

The first day of GDC was quite interesting and was beneficial. Out of curiosity, I had visited the Ubisoft booth, where I attend a lecture on players emotional content in ratio to the experience of the game. I found this talk to be particularly insightful because as we are being prepared for the industry, it is something we as the artist seem to forget when creating games. The director of communications for Tom Clancy's the Division spoke about how they saw the rise and fall of the game and the methods they used to make a comeback for the game. He shared few insightful methods such as stopping the production of the expansions on its tracks rethinking and re-evaluating the problems and implementing the solution from a different perspective. I feel that sitting in this talk gave me an insight of how we as artist and students should proceed with our work as well. We must be critical in our thinking and if something is not working, we must not be afraid as artist and professionals to stop midway and address the issue.

Tuesday

I had visited the VRDC site at GDC where we met Elodie Lorrain Martin, she represented a company called UNLTD.  During my conversations with her, she informed us how they use VR to mix the real world and the CG worlds together seamlessly to make you feel as if you are in a movie being the main character. To be honest it was quite insightful. She explained about how the environment that we were in (inside oculus) was all real world captured footage, and how through programming and skilled editing, they had integrated realistic CG characters that interact with the person real world 360 cameras to capture the experience.

Tuesday

I had also visited back to the Ubisoft booth to listen to the talk about water shaders and how they implemented water shaders in Far Cry 5. I found it quite intriguing that they had used a normal map to create the flow of water in their world. To be honest it was not unheard of as I had seen a tutorial on how to implement the same method on a youtube tutorial as I was making a material in my junior year here at Ringling, however, what I learned from their talk was how they had implemented it in such a large scale for the game. I felt quite intrigued by the method they had used and had taken a video of some of the lecture notes they had given. They use an 8-bit shader which pixelated water shaders and had normals plugged into the normal. After which they inverted the pixels textures to click offspring pixel particles. They use the Max shader alpha to find the depth of the water. They used LOD distance base min of 3 max. Giving it 9 per a pixel. After which they projected that to 32x32 plane mesh. After which they showed us how the flood map and SPF responded to the water.

Wednesday

It was the first time I went and met with the crystal dynamic environment artist and we talked about how to break into the industry. He talked about the number of rejections he had faced when he first started as an environment artist and talked about how to improve my portfolio. I had also met with a game designer at crystal dynamics lunch where we discussed his approach towards creating experiences as well as how the design of level can affect the player. And how critical thinking was important in any aspect of creating environments

Thursday and Friday

I visited Amazon lumberyard for possible portfolio review and had a great talk about my portfolio with one of the recruiters. He and I talked about their new software which looked really interesting to me as it looked like a mix between unity, Maya, and unreal engine. As I attended the talks given by the technical artists. We talked about texturing software and surprisingly, they had not heard about substance products and were using materials in the engine. They also introduced to me about their real-time lighting, where the scene updates as soon as you change the value of a light of add other lights in real time without any build time, which took me by surprise.The animation preview system in their software looked easy to use and seemed that it had an easy workflow built around it. I also visited the twitch booth where they talked about their cloud system and programming.