Sebastian Mundo's GDC

Post date: Mar 16, 2017 6:54:10 PM

Thursday was my first day at GDC, I had arrived late Wednesday and I managed to briefly reunite with some of last year’s senior class at the Ringling get-together. On Thursday, I tried to get a feel for the convention as this was my first GDC. I mostly wanted to figure out what booths were worth visiting for possible internships and portfolio reviews and what were just trying to sell me a product. Unity and Epic had a very strong presence in the convention as they are the industry leading leading engines, with Amazon trying their best to compete by making their Lumberyard area one of the largest booths at the expo and urging people to give it a look. I sat through some of the engine walkthroughs for artists, but ultimately had little interest as it lacked any “killer app” title much less any released titles and it seemed to be marketed towards indie developers. While it certainly had a significant presence, taking up roughly 10% of the convention space, the engine itself seemed extremely lackluster and like an under developed version of UE4.  I also networked with the editor for 80 lv, who seemed to be infatuated with Ringling work and seemed impressed by my Biome.

I met the Ringling alumni Matt Oztalay from Certain Affinity, who discussed his insight of working on a company that handles the multiplayer aspect of many AAA games. One of the most insightful  things i learned from this conversation was how many modern titles such as the upcoming Call of Duty still use ancient heavily modified engines  such as the Quake III engine and as a result when they hire artists or tech artists, they prefer candidates who have shipped at least three different games.

. This feeling of working with a fossil was also shared by my former classmate Mike Marra, who described his experience working as a Lighting Artist on the upcoming Call of Duty title and having to light scenes on the heavily modified Quake engine without so much as having a realtime preview of what the lighting of the scene would look like.

This was my first time and my first day at the convention and while I was somewhat overwhelmed and even discouraged by industry expectations I had built up for myself. It seemed like most positions/jobs for environment art were for graduates and it was difficult to get an understand of what skill level recruiters were looking for.

        Friday, the last day of GDC, I went early to solely get Portfolio reviews from as many developers as I could. I first visited Insomniac, where I got a portfolio review by one of their tech artists who was fairly impressed with some of my material work, foliage, and environment pieces. He provided me with some useful advice in terms of presenting my stronger material work on my portfolio by displaying individual maps instead of a single image with “slices” of different maps as commonly seen in online portfolio sites, especially as it was a good opportunity for me to showcase my Quixel and Substance Designer material work. I then went to Wild Card, the developers of ARK, for a portfolio review by one of their environment artists. While this portfolio review was not as technically helpful as the last, it was a huge confident boost. He seemed to be very impressed by my work and that of Ringling students in general, noting that all of the Junior class material work he has seen from Ringling was a lot more impressive than even most graduating student work from other schools. This is probably the most significant personal note I made of GDC, as I noticed that a lot of the people at the Expo who stopped by the ringling booth were awestruck by the quality of the student work and noted it was of much higher quality than that of theirs. By comparison, SCAD’s booth was about the size of a broom closet and off to the corners of their expo. none of the student work stood out or seemed on par with the quality of the work presented on the Ringling booth and sizzle reel. This gave me the confidence to begin applying for internships as soon as possible instead of mulling as to whether or not my portfolio was good enough to apply to bigger companies.