Kevin Reichwein GDC 2016 Report

Post date: Mar 26, 2016 3:52:12 AM

Day 1

I spent the vast majority of the first day on the career floor getting my portfolio reviewed, which was mostly a waste of time as I got lot’s of comments like “cool” and “nice” which isn’t very constructive. I eventually got annoyed and moved on to the expo floor to see what was happening over there. I stopped by the Ringling booth and was happy to see a lot of my cards had gotten picked up already. After about an hour on the expo floor the halls were getting ready to close for the night so we headed down to the Epic party. Also a waste of time, I’m gonna stop going to those. It’s pretty much impossible to network over the deafening music and anyone worth networking with is too hammered to care or even remember you the next day.

Day 2

Went back to the career floor for most of the day again. This time around was much better, I was able to meet with several vfx artists from Avalanche, Riot, and ILM who gave me invaluable feedback on my portfolio. The people from ILM were looking for artists who had experience with virtual reality, so I aim to get some of that experience while I have access to the Oculus Rift here at Ringling. Aside from the great reviews and talks I had with the vfx artists I also got some great feedback on thesis environments from people at High Voltage and the Gamers for Good booth. I skipped the parties today and worked on my portfolio and applications back at the hostel.

Day 3

Plebian student day. Yay! GDC was swarming with high school kids as usual today. I spent pretty much this whole day on the expo floor, which turned out to be very educational. I sat around at the Epic booth for quite a while watching someone demo Sequencer. For any of you who don’t know about Sequencer it is essentially Matinee 2.0… BUT SO MUCH BETTER. The best way to describe it is that it is Premiere, but inside UE4. When you record footage for a clip it doesn’t just save it out as a video, it keyframes everything. Character movements and animations, particle effects, destructibles, etc. Then you can watch the recording play back in real time in-editor, whilst shuffling these “clips” around and editing them in a Premiere-like fashion. It also adds more realistic camera rigs. They did this to make it easier for actual film makers and cinematographers to jump right into UE4 and understand things. You can place a camera on a dolly, which you can edit the path for as a spline. This was the only rig he went over but I was led to believe they also have stuff like cranes and whatnot. One really cool example he showed us was for recording two characters fighting each other. What he would do is start playing the game (Paragon) as one character, and run through the level, randomly punching at the air and blocking, pretending to react to the hits of a nonexistent player. Then once he was done with that recording he switched players and started playing back the previous recording WHILE he was playing in-game as another character. He could watch as his old character acted out those movements in real time. Then he started another recording with the new character while the old character’s recording was still playing. This time he filled in the missing information, attacking his old character whenever he blocked and chasing after him when he ran. And viola, a multiplayer fight scene created by one player! Technology is beautiful. Once you have all your clips, edit them together right there inside Sequencer then export the full thing! No more exporting each shot individually and editing them in Premiere! Where was this a year ago?! Once the demo was over I did have one question for the guy, and that was “can you chroma key”. Apparently not yet, but they are planning for it. I'm assuming Sequencer comes out in 4.11. I've been pretty disappointed that we haven't seen anything regarding Cascade's replacement, Niagara, but this is just as exciting!