Zaq Schlanger's GDC adventure

Post date: Mar 17, 2017 3:59:23 PM

    I was in an airplane for all of Tuesday and arrived in at around 9:55 too exhausted to try to attend a party so I spent some time double checking my calendar for things I wanted and needed to do over the next few days.

Wednesday: The first and probably most important thing to happen at GDC was that right before I walked over to pick up my pass, I accepted a job offer with Bioware to be on the same team I interned with. This helped me put GDC into perspective and similar to last GDC, I was going in a bit more relaxed and confident. I spent most of the expo day getting to know the floor and checking out some of the booths that I thought would be interesting, as well as seeing the Ringling booth and checking out my trailer on our TV!

Wednesday was my primary casual networking day overall, and it helped me open up my shell that I usually live in while working primarily from home. I tried to talk, even if for a brief amount of time to anyone behind or in front of me, not only to try to make connections, but also to break up the monotony of being in lines. While waiting in line for the Crystal Dynamics gathering, I integrated with team Redlight and friends and starting getting to know the people they had found. I met a super cool artist named Dani who was applying to be a concept artist at Bioware. I took at a look at their portfolio and saw that they had some impressive and diverse work. Little did I know that I would see Dani around 3 times a day for the whole conference, and if they do land that job, quite a bit more. I also had coffee with the art director of SWTOR, the main person I will be reporting to, just to ask some questions and see how he was doing. Since I already knew what I would be doing since I did it last summer, I decided to see how he was doing at GDC and get to know him a little better personally to build a better bond.

I also ran into Emily Gabrian, but not on accident since I went to the Unreal booth to see if she was there. Over the last 4 years at Ringling and attending my second GDC I’ve made a really good connection with her to the point where our customary greeting is a hug instead of a handshake. We walked and talked so she could make her next meeting and I told her the good news. She was surprised I didn’t apply to Epic, and I was equally surprised there would be a spot, but she told me I could have emailed her.

My main takeaways from Wednesday is the importance of building a relationship with your peers in the industry, whether they are an indie developer, random programmer you met in your lunch line, or your future boss or Sr recruiter. I got to see what keeping up and in contact with someone does for my professional relationship, and it encouraged me to keep it up even stronger.

Thursday: Now that I knew the layout of the floor, I decided to make use of that knowledge and see what interesting things I could find and get for free, or learn from. I think Thursday was my tech day, even if it involved receiving free things every now and then. I started the morning with going to the Amazon lumberyard booth with the initial intention of simply getting a free Amazon echo. In the process of getting the echo, I learned a lot about what makes Lumberyard unique and how Amazon is using their strengths in web services and market coverage to enhance their engine.

-Using Amazon Web Services and an easy to work with and artist friendly UI backend, programmers can give artists all they need to publish content directly to games without the need to code. All the artist needs to do is create the content, in their example it was decals on a car, and using an in browser hub, either set it to publish to the app immediately, or on a schedule or for a limited time. This allows artists to integrate content with minimal help from the programmers and create content ahead of time without worrying about missing a push to live game.

-Nvidia was also talking about what they have added to Lumberyard. Using both their improved realtime global illumination and multiple specular and temporal Anti-Aliasing passes, they were able to create technically wonderful environments. Seeing this tech in action really wetted my appetite to try Lumberyard. Here is an article about the AA.

http://www.roadtovr.com/amazon-lumberyard-boosts-realism-impressive-anti-aliasing/

-Just like the simplicity of the AZW services for managing live content, the VR aspect of Lumberyard, while not too different from Unreal’s, was impressive. Out of the box, Lumberyard allows for integration of around 98% of all existing VR platforms, the other 2% being the non mainstream mobile platforms such as non-cellphone based ones. They allow for open source setups of VR headset programming to be added using their web service as explained above. Users can use whatever set up they please, whether it be the official code from HTC, or a custom one found on the lumberyard marketplace.

I got to see Brad Smith, a Ringling graduate from quite a while ago, give a talk on texturing the hero Crunch. He talked mostly about keeping it overall simple, but adding massive complexity by using custom filters and masks created in designer. He went over how to create Painter filters and how using custom outputs at 0-1 values as your mask, you can get amazing and highly customizable results. His two main examples that sort of blew my mind where creating a complex peeling paint normal mask, which due to the simplicity of the gradient it follows, was stupid simple once used in Painter. He also for the sake of showing an easy to grasp example, showed how to do tempered metal, also using a very simple gradient. He stressed that this is super important due to the need to create multiple diverse character skins that may call for more or less grunge, scratches or damage.

The takeaway that inspired me from this talk was that the more work you put into your instances, the better you can later iterate and create new texture sets for the intended asset and any others that may use the same filters.

While the talk is not yet available online, here is the hero’s intro video where you can understand the detail put into their character and understand why you must almost abuse instances and custom filters.

https://www.epicgames.com/paragon/en-US/news/new-hero-reveal-crunch

Friday: On Friday, it was a combination of the themes of the last two days. For one half I spent my time learning more about Substance Designer and both workflow and aesthetic tips. For the other half, I spent networking and socializing to further my abilities in communicating and building bonds.

I sat in on a talk at the Allegorithmic booth to see Josh Lynch talk about creating marble and plaster substances. His workflow was similar to mine at the moment, where most of his generated height information was using many iterations of default Substance noises and distorting them to look unique and mold them to your liking. I picked up some things I hadn’t thought of before like applying a whole line of directional warps going different directions to create a more natural and less procedural looking marble. Also, a very simple and easy to integrate tip he gave was to rotate your noise textures for your whole material by 45 degrees so tiling is less visible when viewing it in game. Overall my takeaway from his talk was to use multiple iterations of nodes like directional warp and slope blur to give a much more believable and customizable material.

Some other neat things I picked up from him, reinforcing Brads talk from yesterday, was to create instanced functions and use them throughout your workflow. One I found most useful were a custom threshold node that allows your to simultaneously adjust the maximum black and white value using levels of a map to adjust the contrast; I created a version from trial and error when I returned home. Another really useful tip when creating a graph you want to have multiple purposes for is using switch parameters, something I am quite used to doing in my materials in Unreal.

The second half of the day I spent having casual, but still technically networking, conversations. I met with the creative director of Cold Iron studios, my mentor’s boss, who really wanted to meet with me and get to know me. He really loved my work and overall the school’s work and would love to work more with us and myself in the future. Our conversation ranged from my workflow and design decisions, to talking about his previous jobs and his current one, trying to get to know what Cold Iron is doing without breaking any NDAs. I felt that our conversation was one of the most natural and engaging ones I had at GDC and I really felt like we connected. We agreed to keep in contact for the future and to keep each other updated with potential positions and people to fill them.