Hailey's GDC Experience

Post date: Mar 10, 2017 10:30:55 PM

This was my first time attending GDC. Overall it was an eye-opening experience. Being able to connect people to the games and companies I’ve admired for years was really informative. I was surprised by how relaxed the overall atmosphere was, people were so down to earth and overall very friendly and helpful. Being out there with industry professionals who not only create amazing content, but are also excited about the content you are creating is super refreshing and has given me more energy coming back to Ringling.

Arriving Tuesday afternoon, I was quick to get my ticket before the rush the next day to make my Wednesday more efficient. I ended up going to both Polycount and Githubs mixers. These were excellent opportunities to warm up to networking and definitely helped make Wednesday less overwhelming. One of the most memorable moments from Tuesday for me was getting to talk to Becca Hallstedt, one of my favorite stylized texture artists. She and I talked at length about using a combination of procedural and hand-painted techniques to create appealing stylized textures. While she definitely approached texturing from a more concept art/illustration view, she wholeheartedly endorsed the Substance Designer → Zbrush → Photoshop pipeline. Starting out the week with such a strong connection left me feeling confident for Wednesday.

Before I came to GDC, I started using Twitter and other forms of social media to help promote myself as an artist and it ended up being a huge advantage for me. The CEO/Founder of Allegorithmic (the creators of Substance Painter + Designer) reached out to me on Twitter before I even arrived at GDC and invited me to come talk to him at their booth. I made that my first priority Wednesday and ended up showing him my work. He was really impressed at the combination of Substance Designer and UE4 to create some materials, and told me he wanted to create a Student Work Showcase for students using their software. Something I am personally passionate about is the indie game development scene, so I went over to Double Fine’s Day of the Dev set up and got to meet the developers of the upcoming title Ooblets. Getting to know Ben and Rebecca (the developers), they shared how exhausting and overwhelming being just a team of two can be, and how seeing the public react so positively to their game at GDC was crucial to their workflow. It reignited the passion to continue working on their game. They also talked about how working with Double Fine as a publisher was a huge benefit. Having people to take care of the legal and logistical elements really makes life as an indie dev easier, without sucking all the creativity out of their project.

Thursday and Friday some of the biggest takeaways I found were the sore need for not only Technical and VFX artists, but for people comfortable with materials and shaders too. I got to talk to both Brad Smith and Harrison Moore -- both of whom work for Epic as Tech/Shader artists. They were kind enough to look at my work and give me feedback on how to improve. Their biggest points of improvement were how crucial the Roughness values are in materials, and how 50% of material work is just lighting it really nicely. Brad Smith also gave a talk about his workflow from Substance Designer -> Substance Painter -> Unreal Engine. He stressed the importance of creating custom generators and tools to import into Substance Painter to make things more efficient. I’m looking forward to implementing this pipeline into senior thesis production. One of the final points from GDC was talking to Matt Taylor, the senior character artist from Blizzard. Beyond the art and the tech, Matt stressed how important making connections with industry professionals is for later employment. Building relationships with individuals, not just about mutual gain but in a mentorship/mentee role can be so important later down the line, which is something I never really thought about.

So in conclusion some larger points from my experience at GDC:

• • Using social media to connect with developers and promote yourself is crucial. Being able to leverage social media popularity to get people to recognize your work will open doors that your portfolio alone can’t do.

  • Substance Designer and Painter are quickly becoming the cutting edge of material/shader creation, and being able to use them beyond just basic texture creation is going to be a big advantage going forward. Being able to use these programs to create tools to customize your workflow will help make your work more consistent and efficient

  • Lighting is 50% of material work, and learning how to light well will only strengthen my portfolio.

Moving forward I plan on:

• • Several people were very interested in my shader work and wanted to see a breakdown/write up, so I am currently working on putting that together to send to people who are interested.

  • Learn more about how to light scenes well and leverage lighting to better show off my material work

• Reach out to several developers, not necessarily for internships but to cultivate a professional friendship to help my career in the future.