Challenge is the prime motivation for anyone to outperform. Having said that the question is “How do you keep yourself challenged”?
What do you do when you are being under-challenged by the team/project?
Do you keep digging in the pipeline you just deployed? And try to improve it?
Or do you start honing skills of some other domain(rigging,vfx,shaders,c#) ?
Or you start a little project to implement some tech or design idea?
For myself,
I read a lot, magazines, articles, forums, books. And try to get overview of almost all Art/Tech Art skills.
What do other TAs do to stay right on the challenge curve?
Stepping back is an important phase of work for me, as priorities constantly shift within a project and features of the game can become “neglected” over time. I like to step back to look at the areas that need the most technical improvement when i have spare time, and then i turn this analysis into a very short sprint; 1 day to 2 weeks max, and do everything I can in my spare time to address the issues and document blocking issues for others that will eventually pop up.
Ideally there is no down time, and it can be exhausting, but at least I don’t get bored :-p
Its always good to have a personal project going on. But sometime in terms of development I find myself juggling between “what I want to learn for long term” and “what project demands in near future”.
I’m often in the same spot as you, I can get bored pretty easily if I’m doing the same thing over and over for more than a week. I find that keeping multiple projects going on at the same time and being able to switch between them tends to be helpful.
I’ll have my main responsibilities with shaders and rigging and whathave you, but I also try to find other areas that I could expand my knowledge base, things like firing up the game code and mucking around to make simple changes, writing up websites to improve workflows (webforms that send preformatted emails), learning new languages to fit a new need, delving into APIs, right now I’m eyeballing Twisted in Python to rewrite a distributed system into a master/slaves system.
Going back and fixing past pipelines is also very common, I tend to want to rewrite things every now and again when I learn something new that could speedup/cleanup the current implementation.
Just surfing the web sometimes is enough inspiration to want to implement a similar system, or write something a different way, or figure out how something in robotics might apply to rigging. Watch some TED Conference videos, they’ll spark up some challenges for you =)
Going back and fixing past pipelines is also very common, I tend to want to rewrite things every now and again when I learn something new that could speedup/cleanup the current implementation.
This is exactly why I rewrote a pipeline 3 times. Each time with different language(MEL, Python, C++) for different experimental purposes. And every time I find previous code chaotic, inefficient or less artist-friendly. Discussing programming paradigms with software engineers helps me out in that case.
Its always exciting to look at different aspects of game and at the same time other aspects of technical art. Wish I have more variety in work and more time to experiment/implement.
Currently putting my head into different ways of writing 3ds max tools(Maxscript, .NET Tools, API(off course), Python <-> Max via COM)