GDC 2019 Stepan Zakharenko

Post date: Mar 27, 2019 6:0:58 PM

Being a part of GDC 2019 was a great opportunity to better understand the game industry, as well as, have an opportunity to see industry professionals and get some feedback from them.

My first observation at GDC was that they are less artists in the industry than i thought. I always thought that the industry is really good crowded with artists, and that's why we are told at Ringling that there is high competition, which is true, but in reality there are not that many people who can do what we do at Ringling. I had a chance to meet Kirill Tokarev from 80 lvl at Ringling booth who wanted to interview any ringling student and he told me that it is impressive how RCAD students do everything, we model, texture, vsx, animation and hard surface and we do it good, as well as, Thomas from Epic Games Education that told me that ringling work is the best and it is sad that all of us should send our work showreels to Epic Games Education and it can be displayed at Epic Games booth at next GDC. It definitely made me feel good and made me value myself and my friends even more, and pushed me to want me do better work and polish my work more.

The second thing i realize is that i had to make a better schedule and decide what exactly i want to see and which talks i want to attend. I am interested in Ubisoft Kyiv, and i missed the talk of their tech artist and i believe i missed a lot, because i think it would be beneficial talking to him before i contact their office.

For my last observation i realized that there was a lot of talks and showcases about optimization. Because every game tries to be more visually sophisticated and at the same time run smoothly. I was surprised when i accidently walked in the Intel booth and the guy started talking to me about optimisation and procedural set dressing of the biome that he is working on. It was crazy, the biome was over a 100k UU by 100k UU and was populated with foliage meshes with multiple LOD levels with 4k to 8k textures. Every camera shoot was photorealistic and the area of exploration was enormous. But what's is more impressive is that it has frame rate of over 60 frames, even when the time of the day changes the high definition surfaces stay the same and frame rates doesn’t drop. For me it was truly impressive how they achieved that level of optimization using only moveable lights because there was lots of issues that i ran to during my Biome project, and now working on my Thesis Prepro i really started thinking how i can optimize my game and run it smoothly.