The GDC Experience

Post date: Mar 28, 2014 6:51:23 PM

My experience at GDC was mostly limited to the expo floor and the career/play area. In retrospect I really with I had gone ahead and bought the main conference pass. I missed out on all the cool talks and I feel lesser for it. I did however get some really good feedback on how to structure my portfolio from my experience roaming the floors and talking to real industry professionals.

At the Insomniac booth (and a few others) they wanted so see higher resolution texture maps. On my contact sheet I had to scale down the maps to fit with the wire frame models. I wanted to get as much information condensed on a single sheet as possible so my presentation could be more streamlined. Looking back it might have been better to have the actual sized maps available on request. Many of the people I talked to would try and zoom in on the maps in my contact sheet but would become disappointed by the low resolution.

I also cant stress enough how important composition and lighting are for presenting your environment art. Sparth at the xbox portfolio reviews told me he sees too many environment artists that don't understand how to build a composition and light a scene. He also talked about the importance of leading the viewer into the scene. Whether that be with some sort of road or river. Lucky for me my biome environment really hit home on those points and I even learned that the best compositions connect two of the hotspots (rule of thirds) with a diagonal.

When I talked to Obsidian Entertainment they stressed the importance of tailoring a portfolio to the interests of the company your pitching too. Obsidian works mostly with fantasy (old world) and they expect artists to show them their skills for developing art for that theme. Also if your going to submit work for environment art you should try and keep character work out of that portfolio submission.

Over all my experience roaming the floors of the expo was pretty cool. Saw a lot of really cool indie games and developers, some cool new game tech, and met some students from our "rival" schools. Next time I think I'll go for the main conference pass. It's not a lot of fun waiting for them to hit the vault.