We are looking at doing another Technical Art techniques panel at GDC next year. Does anyone have anything they would want to talk about? Any new techniques or pipeline methodologies that you think are interesting and you are allowed to talk about.
You should also be able to talk easily in front of a lot of people, half of the session is QA with the audience. Last year we had over 145 Tech Artists in attendance!
CE
If i end up going to GDC, i wouldn’t mind talking a bit about Python .NET and Maya/Motionbuilder. Not sure how much really compelling content i would have since alot of the way we use it is really specific to our pre-existing managed toolset, but. . .well yeah, there it is.
Hey Chris - It was cool to bump in to you at Siggraph. As I said, I’d be interested in participating on the panel. I’m not sure how much of our project will be public by GDC, but I’ll find out what topics I can speak about at that point and let you know.
what type of material are you looking for?
Rigging, Shaders, Pipeline? all? role of TA in the studio or actual techniques?
Just to throw this out there, recently i’ve been doing alot of work on extending Maya through python and SWIG. i may have some more stuff showable, at the very least i’ve come up with some interesting Maya python techniques. It’s all generic/project agnostic enough that i could put together a short presentation on it.
It’s more 4 TAs on stage talking about how they dealt with certain problems. Since we all do a lot of the same things, people like hearing how different studios tackled them differently. Last year we mainly talked about characters. I did not realize so many studios used DCC apps for level editing. The 4 guys would agree on the topics; things they think really made an indelible impact on this year.
I would say facial mocap for instance. Last year, one game used facial mocap (heavenly sword) this year there are tons! I know many TAs who are tackling this workflow now.
Our studio is heavily into facerobot, we also helped develop the wrestler head for mova Mova : Gallery : CONTOUR Reality Capture Examples the Real-time version is running in unreal3. Fun stuff…
That head looks good, but Mova? Does that mean the data is baked to 700 bones then a TA deletes them down to 255 to get in ue3? (also, did you guys have to send the tongue/mouth off to china?) We spoke to the Mova people but this is what the tech sounded like.
We talked about ucap/mova last year on the panel. Paul Thuriot was one of the TAs and he helped develop ucap at EA.
Can you comment at all after integrating it into a game? Do you only use it for cutscenes? I view it as basically an uneditable animation. They said ‘now you can edit it’ by mapping their mesh to a 700 vert head, then running a mel script to create one bone per vert.
imho that is still not ‘editable’. but it sure does look good.
Thanks,
I asked the Softimage rep myself and they couldn’t tell me a game studio that has used FR, though I see some japanese ones on the website.
We tested it, and I asked if it was still $90,000, but I never really heard back. With a better ‘bake2bones’ pipeline, this could convert, but really, after working so hard getting things to look right in there, it would be nice to have a middleware solution a la humanik for wysiwyg x360 and ps3. All of this was about 8 months ago, anything new happened on that front?
I’d love to talk about the value of wrangling metrics data associated with assets, and how these metrics can chnage the way we make choices as artists during course opf a project.
I’ve only just discovered tech-artists.org so sorry for digging up an old thread.
I attended that session at GDC this year, thanks to those that presented.
If you’re still after people to talk, I’d be happy to talk a little about art tools and tech we use as a small(ish) studio doing short timeline multiplatform projects. EG 5 sku’s in 6-12 months.
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