Zachary Forrest GDC 2016

Post date: Mar 25, 2016 8:39:3 PM

1) I spoke to a couple industry professionals about being a generalist vs being a specialist. The industry professionals are part of small and large companies. The small companies explained they wanted to see generalists and the mid to large companies wanted specialists. Mid companies being 10+. I also saw how companies that are more inclined to do stylized art needed more generalists. I assume this is because it takes more time to make assets w/ textures to create a style.

2) I was observing whether or not Ringling doing VR was a positive or negative thing. Seeing more people at the booth and asking Holly and Rew what they thought about the traction near the booth, I believe the VR was a good idea. At least 80% of the Expo Floor was VR and even if they weren't exclusive VR, they had a section of VR. An example is Crytek had their section but 1/4 was dedicated to VR. I noticed also a lot of people wanted to try VR out and since the lines were 30+ minute waits, seeing Ringling's booth with an Oculus made them come and talk to us while they played. It's debatable whether adding 1 or more stations of the VR headsets could be a good thing. We ran into issues with the Oculus such as flickering and loss of connection.

3) I spoke to two Naughty Dog texture artists about the use of Substance vs Quixel. They both were giving demo's on how they do their workflow and what product they want to achieve. One of the guys was more classified as a Technical Artist and explained to me that he would rig, level design, texture, and model from a day to day basis. His job was to pick up or start a project to get the ball rolling or keeping the ball rolling. He was a pure artist too which confused me because I thought a technical artist had to/do more programming side of things such as creating useful tools for artists. They said as long as you know one you're fine. The "taste" of the artist will come into play and show whether or not they are good.