Harry Gray Strolls Through GDC 2019

Post date: Apr 05, 2019 1:36:13 AM

1.     Assassins Creed Modular Materials

Day one of being at GDC I realized that Substance Day was going on. A day long event in which the Allegorithmic team will showcase the advances and benefits of substance programs displaying training, tips, and industry presentations on their usage of Substance programs. The first I went to was based on an artists top tips for substance, what was great about this was my own realization of how much we get taught at Ringling. I knew most of it (besides a few cool buttons I’ll be hitting from here on out). However, Ubisoft Montreal had a surfacing artist and technical artist discuss how they used Substance Designer and Painter to their full potential as well as their own engine material editor. Making shapes in Designer and painting those tillable materials in Painter was a genius showcase of  using each programs best abilities. But what really struck me was the relevance of my ‘Modular Material’ process. In Assassins Creed their whole material library is based in a modular system that I was able to fully understand having gone through the process in thesis.

2.     Future Ray Tracing advances impacting dynamics in environments

Hot Damn. My soon to be future in Dynamics with 343 has heightened my awareness to the challenges and costs of having a dynamic world. But the big challenge, lighting, is about to have an overhaul in UE4. UE4’s development of easy to render, optimized dynamic lighting is going to benefit environment artists in a multitude of ways. What they wanted to showcase specifically was their ray tracing reflections. Which, while beautiful to see in real time, was just that – beautiful. It added great realism to the scene. But the hidden genius behind it is the decreased cost of unbaked, dynamic lighting. The reason games don’t have a lot of large scale dynamic movement in game play is you can’t bake that. But by decreasing the cost environments will be able to thrive in a more lively and rich immersion.

3.     The benefits of a tutorial

I never knew that my ‘Technical Tips for Environment Artists’ would have the impact it did. I released it in the hopes of showcasing my ability to communicate between departments, and share some useful information to the world. It also ended up acting as my highest grossing release. Between amateurs starting their craft and senior lighting artists I had people saying that it should be required reading for all environment artists. This relates to GDC because only when I was able to talk to people in person did I find out that my reputation had preceded me in a couple cases and was able to meet with 80lvl’s co-founder to release it as an article on their site. From that I can’t recommend highly enough that if someone overcame an issue during thesis, and can target a specific (preferably high population) audience, then to put effort into a detailed document in a tutorial fashion.