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Tech Art

Perforce “Cannot mkdir” Error

I ran into an issue setting up my own Perforce server recently where I could not submit local files to a depot I had created manually. Perforce threw all manner of errors including “cannot mkdir <depotname>” etc. etc. etc. Looking online, it seemed like the issue ran much deeper than it actually was. The problem, I found out, was that when I made the new depot I had set its mapping as “//<depotname>/…”, which is wrong. All depot mappings in Perforce need to be “<depotname>/…” because they are mapped to the p4root directory.

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Tech Art

Building Tech Art Infrastructure I

This is a summation of the discussion and progress I’ve reported so far, and will continue to do (until such time as my employment at Vigil ends… at the end of the month), on this Tech-Artists.org thread

First, some background. When I started at Vigil as an Environment Artist, the extent of Tech Art at the studio was a few tools that had been created for Darksiders I back in 2007. Few people at the company know MaxScript, or Python, and the Environment Art team had no one to go to if they thought of something that needed automation. If those people existed, their presence wasn’t well-publicized. In my first few weeks, I noticed myself hitting the same buttons hundreds of times to do the same things. I pinged h6x6n to give me a hand and automate one of these things, and in the process acted as an intermediary between him and Max to make sure the code worked. From there, the artists immediately around me started to request other automated macros. A few months later I was adding these scripts and others into our official toolset, had access to the code branch, and spent more and more time writing tools both in Python and Maxscript. The scope of the tools I was writing grew, the number of teams I was assisting grew, I started talking to programmers, helping producers generate reports on various pieces of data in the game. I was a tech artist. Familiar story, yes? It all goes down hill from there…

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Tech Art

Player Position-based Material

Recently, a coworker posed a question to me:
“How do you pass the player position to a material in UDK?”

“Well, couldn’t you just use the CameraWorldPosition node? The player and the camera are so close together the effect should be enough, right?” replied I.

“That could work, but I want to do a far-back third-person camera,” he countered.

“Oh…” I said.

After attempting a solution that was, admittedly, rather hacky involving trying to programmatically derive the location of the player based off a known distance between the camera and the player, I opted for something that could be considered hacky, but is as close to a programatic solution as an artist can get.

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Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Crafting Satisfying Combat Experiences at Insomniac

Steps for a basic combat experience –

  1. Establish a front
  2. Layer setup
  3. Establish a combat focus
  4. Useful and clear cover
  5. Send enemies in waves
  6. Have a clear flanking route
  7. Re-direct the front
  8. Effectively use high-priority targets

Give players an immediate read of the space

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Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Tech Art Roundtable 3

How do you optimize across multiple platforms?

Optimizing for WinXP is bad because it’s worse than phones right now

More people at the roundtable compared to two years ago. The room was too full!

 

Education -> Need TA students to solve real-world problems

  • Tech Art training sounds like its best done on a person-by-person basis, so many skills that can’t be taught in classroom
  • Find the ones that have a talent or interest in it? Are they problem-solvers? Do they tinker? Do they teach other students?
  • Have potential TAs do a rotation through IT (Or expand role of lab monitors to really include troubleshooting student issues, and pump TAs through that)

 

How do you institutionally encourage this behavior?

  • Documentation, Tools-writing, Tinkering, Helping other students
  • Potential TAs need to get work done too, establish rules so they can get it done
  • Mentorship of younger TAs by established ones in school?
  • Hire students to act as tech artists in on-campus facilities?

 

Tech Artists are Force Multipliers, Firefighters, and Preemptive Firefighters

  • Look Development
    • Shaders
  • Tools programming
  • Problem-solvers
  • Riggers
    • Tech Animators
  • Outsource Wranglers

 

They MUST work alongside artists, be embedded with them (works well at Volition)

TAs need people and managerial skills

 

How do you test tech artists right out of school?

  • Tests

Games are innovating faster because teams are smaller and more agile than film

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Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Strategy Games Panel

We’re seeing a lot Cinderella success stories int he strategy gaming realm, lots of one-man projects rocking the show

What Needs to Change

  • Put design first
    • Maintain core values
    • Player Choice!
  • Think at all different levels of intensity
    • Smaller games -> do they need single-player campaigns?
      • Sins of a Solar Empire doesn’t have one, for example
    • Cut to the chase
    • Minimize design clutter
    • Check scope
  • Cheaper delivery methods
  • Focus on one audience
    • Acknowledge that you can’t please everyone
  • Focus on user experiences

Soren Johnsons on League of Legends: “The facebook game for people who like games”

 

Everyone learned humility in the face of Facebook games

 

Players are interested in interesting decisions and the consequences thereof

 

“Co-op CompStomp”

  • Want kind of RTS would you make if you didn’t include PvP?

Key Issue -> Accessibility

  • Limited by manuals and documentation
  • Need tutorials and intro levels

Will AI get better?

  • Yes, but we don’t need a Terminator, we need a Terminator w/ enough flaws to entertain

 

iPad and iPhone aren’t stealing because they serve different purposes and different audiences

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Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Art Direction for Photoreal Games

It’s really all about getting everything looking juuuuust right

Photoreal is just as much an art direction decision as any other style, and there’s a lot of room to play around in that

Photoreal requires a lot of creativity, it’s not easy, very difficult to achieve

“cinematic photoreal” -> beautiful and visually distinct images

-Every film has its own unique look, and you can pick out a shot from films even if you have no contextual information at all

Photoreal can be achieved through proper application and use of:

  1. Textures
  2. Lighting
  3. Post Effects
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Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Art Culture Panel

“No dicks, no douchebags, no drama” ~ Gearbox

Gearbox encourages culture of critique through anonymous peer reviews of both person and work

Encourage mindset of “How good is that other guy, and how do I figure out what he knows?”

Have “Training Days” -> Everyone teaches something

Show and Tell days -> Art Councils in different fields that discuss techniques to better each other.

Cooking Show-type tutorials

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Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Designing Limbo’s Puzzles

Focus on gameplay

Puzzle Design Principles in Limbo

  • Challenging problem-solving
  • There’s a difference between pretending to solve a puzzle (doing a puzzle) vs. actually solving a puzzle (thinking through, arriving at conclusion, executing)
  • Easy and quickly-understandable mechanics
  • As few elements as possible and simple elements
  • Discourage brute-force trial and error, it ends with the player not getting enough of a sense of achievement
  • Don’t repeat puzzles, puzzles do not have replay value
  • Solve complicated problems with simple explanation
  • Do not challenge player through volume of STUFF

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Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Postmortem

Went to GDC this year, had a lot of fun. Met a lot of great people, expanded my knowledge base even more.

Advice

  • If you worked at a studio over the summer, it’s likely better to wear some manner of apparel from that studio than to try and dress fancy. A lot of devs walk around the conference advertising the studio they work for through apparel, and if you can immediately implant the idea in the recruiters’ mind that you’re a dev, you skip the “Student” perception entirely. I didn’t do this, but it seemed to benefit others.
  • Adapted from Seth Gibson: you spend all this time in school learning, and by the time you get out your portfolio might not look totally consistent because you’ve got work that spans over a year or more. If you’re struggling to get a job, you’d do yourself a favor by spending three months after graduation building a portfolio of new work that better reflects the current state of your skills.
  • Different studios want different thing –
    • Someone doesn’t care about lower poly-counts, whereas another does.
    • One studio might want to see that you can take your own photo-source textures, while another doesn’t care that you use CGtextures
    • Some studios will say “your work is good enough to get you hired”, while someone else rips you to shreds
    • Your art director from over the summer might love the spaceship you did, while the hiring manager at Obsidian might think that very same spaceship makes you look like you’re coming straight out of college
    • One wants to see concept art and process drawings, while another would just want models
    • One may say your stuff looks unoriginal, but another might buy you a drink because of it
  • You don’t want to be just a swiss army knife, nor do you want to be just a scalpel. Your best bet is to be a swiss army knife with a scalpel. Be really good at one thing, and have a good awareness of everything else.
  • Use of Crazybump was noticed in my portfolio on a couple of occasions, and I was discouraged from using it. Additionally, I was discouraged from having black appear on my normal maps.
  • When wandering the Career Pavilion floor, I would advocate that students ask for critique on their portfolio instead of asking about internships. This show’s you’re forward-thinking and can take critique, all plusses.
  • Some studios who locate themselves exclusively in the business center may also have people who can look at portfolios! Don’t be afraid, it never hurts to ask
  • Let your work speak for itself, if it’s really good stuff it’ll show. Beyond that, just make sure you’re not insane and you’ll have a good chance at making an impact on the people you’re talking to.
  • Don’t forget to ask “what’s the next step” when at the Career Pavilion
  • Offer business cards, don’t ask for them. This gives people the opportunity to stay in touch with YOU
  • Follow up, follow up, follow up
  • Your portfolio should tell whoever is looking at it what you want to do, if they have to ask your portfolio is probably too broad
    • To that end, only show what you want to do

Conference Observations

  • Not as many students bum-rushed the Career Pavilion on the final day, it was actually somewhat managable
  • Lots of people end up at the W
  • iPhone and Indie devs roamed the conference looking for artists lined up for portfolio reviews, seeing who they could snag to work on their projects. This is a trend I expect to continue in coming years.
  • I got the impression that most parties ended between 10pm and 12am, make sure you get to whatever party you found out about before this time.
  • 19,000 people this year, holy crap

Food and Drink

  • Johnny Foley’s has a dueling piano bar, which was pretty fun on my last night there
  • Gotta keep moving and operating in smaller units, 10 is probably the max of any one group going out to eat. We did 15 one night and that was  madness
  • If you’re in a pinch, the Metreon has a few quick-service places to eat, this ended up being my default most days. I would, however, recommend the Chaat Cafe if you have the time.
  • Look into the Anti-Saloon League, 441, or Swig
  • Osha Thai
  • Fang
  • Thirsty Bear Brewing Company
  • Annabelle’s Bar and Bistro
  • Mel’s Diner (good in a pinch, quick service)
  • Canton Dimsum

San Francisco

  • Bums were out in even greater force and fervor this year
  • Cold and windy year, why was it so early?!
  • The Musee Mechanique is no longer free 🙁

College

  • 32 Students/Recent Ringling Alum attended,  8 times our 2009 attendance. Of those, 4 were Conference Associates, 15 seniors, 9 juniors, 3 sophomores, 2 illustrators, and 2 2010 graduates