Preston's GDC Report

Post date: Apr 05, 2019 8:23:6 PM

The Lack OF VR

So the big thing I noticed this year was a suspicious lack of VR. Don’t get me wrong. There was plenty of VR. But there was significantly less booths and indie companies showing off their new VR game/venture compared to last year. This year there was a far greater emphasis on tools and how to partner with big companies like Epic, Unity, and Microsoft. As for the VR that was still being shown. Oculus was still showing off it’s new tech at it’s booth. But by and large the only VR I saw was from schools and a few companies.

Ringling and the Industry

One of the activities I like to do when I go to GDC is see how well we as school stack up to industry professionals and other schools. The first instance was when I went to the substance talks. I only attended two. One was a presentation of substance painter by a keynote speaker who works at dreamworks and has art featured on the loading screen for substance painter. What was interesting about her presentation was that most of the information she was conveying to the crowd was information that we as students had already learned. It felt good to have affirmation that what we were being taught in school was being talked about in the industry.

As for the other schools booths. There was still an emphasis on selling the school rather than the quality of work that the students produce.

Tools and New Tech

One of the more notable experiences with new tech came in the form of programmer tools that were integrated into substance. One such example was in the substance days talks I attended where they had devs from Ubisoft talk about the development of materials in their recent game Assassin's creed Odyssey. A Lot of the talk was centered around the artistic look and feel of the materials, but they also talked about how they achieved PBR uniformity with dev tools that could show an artist where their Values where off. They even had the tool so refined you could use a slider to adjust the values until the visualiser disappeared. I thought this was pretty neat as it could be a good thing to teach during sophomore year.

The other big showcase was that of Alchemy, the new tool by Algorithmic. Alchemy was developed to allow for quick material blending via height map, something that could be done in substance designer. Now done under the hood in Alchemy. I think this tool will be a game changer as it now makes iteration quick and effective. The program even has the ability to take the newly created material and export it back into substance designer.