Jake Mandel Popovics' GDC Report Post

Post date: Mar 17, 2017 8:44:49 AM

GDC was quite a doozy for me this year. Lot's of great networking was to be had. I arrived in San Francisco Tuesday evening, too late to get pick up badges but just in time for the tech art/vfx mixer, which was a whole lot of fun. I met Redlight's thesis mentor, Fred, in person for the first time, which was very cool. We had some fun chit chat about Popcorn FX. Thanks to Dale, I talked to Mark, an FX artist at Bethesda, and, along with Dale and Lauren, was invited to have lunch and discuss our reels with him on Thursday. This was very exciting. Immediately afterwards Jamie introduced me to Dave Sirlin, who's company I had recently applied to. We had a great conversation about his game and stylized vfx for fighting games. At the end of the mixer, a vfx contest was announced, which I am trying to participate in.

The first half of Wednesday was spent wandering around the show floor, checking out what the expo had to offer, and going to the Crystal Dynamics mixer. I spent a lot of time at the SideFX booth since they were demoing a ton of Houdini features like converting fluid simulations into meshes for use in UE4 and how they created volumetric clouds for Battlefield 1 using Houdini by simulating a sky and using a mesh generated from the clouds in Houdini to spawn cloud sprites in Frostbite. After a thrilling series of demos I went over to the Riot mixer, where I met Jason Keyser and Jin Yang, who gave me great critique on my VFX reel. They both complimented my timing, but said that I need to use color and brightness to drive focal points in my effects. This made a lot of sense. I was surprised to find that a lot of other FX artists had already seen my reel, since I had posted it on realtimevfx.com. I thought that was pretty cool. Just goes to show that you never know who'll check out your work when you post it online. After the Riot mixer I went to the Ringling party which was nice.

I started Thusday off with Mark reviewing my reel over lunch. His critique was very similar to Jason and Jin's. He talked a lot about how every effect should be able to tell a story, which I thought was a good way to look at things and will strive to achieve in the future. Later that day I went to the Thursday evening VFX mixer where I met a myriad of awesome vfx artists with the help of Jin who almost literally threw Hedidjah from Blizzard at me. In my conversation with her I learned the Hearthstone has only a single VFX artist working on it. That being her.

On Friday I waited in a long line to talk to Hi-Rez. One of their art dir3ectors gave me very specific feedback on my reel, which was nice. Afterwards I went to the portfolio killer reviews where I had my work looked at by Wyeth Johnson from Epic. He nailed me on the visibility of my meshes and lack of alpha erosion on several emitters.