GDC2011 Wrapup

Community
1

Wow! What an INCREDIBLE GDC! Sorry for the late post- I needed last week to recover. Here’s a recap:

Tech Artist Bootcamp
We had some incredible speakers and we were all awed with the attendance and retention. Below are the slides from all the bootcamp presenters. If you want to see a bootcamp next year, please tell us what you liked and didn’t like and what you’d like to see covered. I can’t speak for Jeff but I imagine he’s planning another one. The existing bootcamp discussion thread is here.

[B].zip with all 8 talks[/B] (No videos)

Keith Self-Ballard “In Advocacy of Tech Art”
Scott Goffman “Making Tools Your Artists Will Use”
Rob Galanakis “Ending The Culture War”
Seth Gibson “TA Personality Assessment”
Steve Theodore “Epic Fail”
Adam Pletcher “Tech Art and Databases”
Bryan Moss “Using Sim Data In Realtime With Video Textures” (Videos)
Bronwen Grimes “Shader Techniques in Portal 2”

tech-artists.org Meetup
We had a lot of people. Holy moly. We totally dominated the 4th Street Bar- thanks to Seth (djtomservo) for putting it together.

Tech Art Lectures
There were a ton of tech art-centric lectures at GDC this year. I can’t believe how many times I heard ‘tech artist’ mummered by people on the streets of San Francisco. Great job to everyone who presented! Also special callout to Bronwen Grimes and Adam Mechtley, who were rated amongst the top speakers last year (sorry if I missed anyone else). And of course we have both Steve Theodore and Jeff Hanna on the Advisory Board.

Tech Art/Tech Animation Roundtables
These were great again this year. It behooves any TA to attend at least one of each per GDC. People say these tend to be some of the most valuable sessions they attend. Jeff and Timmy did an excellent job hosting.

IGDA Education SIG TA Interviews
Bill Crosbie, an education and member of the IGDA’s Education Special Interest Group, was conducting interviews with Tech Artists at GDC. The goal is to start putting together a curriculum for educators, to create and grow effective tech artists (and educate the educators about the viability and possibility of tech art in general). You can see all the interviews here, including most speakers from the Bootcamp.

The Future!
One common thing I saw is that the community really wants TAO to move forward into the mobile age. I am going to start some initiatives to work us in with twitter/facebook, a mobile version of the forums, aggregate blogs, etc. I’ll be posting some issues for feedback regarding the trajectory of this site, tech art, and other issues, in the general discussion forum, based on what I’ve been feeling post-GDC.

Thanks, everyone, for a fantastic GDC!

2

Thanks for the recap, Rob, and everyone else for a great GDC. Thanks especially, Jeff, for hosting the roundtables. I only made it to one this year, but I don’t think I had previously appreciated what a good job he does of making sure everyone has a chance to contribute, especially with as much as they have grown.

Where did you get the information on speaker ratings, Rob? That’s news to me, and very humbling. I really appreciate everyone who showed up in support of my session, and I’ll post up a full write-up and source code on my site sometime in the next couple days.

3

Thank you for posting this! GDC was awesome and I deeply wished I could have stayed for the entire bootcamp (but volunteer duty called.) I loved every moment that I was there! At least I can still check out all of the great information covered, via the slides I just downloaded from this post. Thanks again!

4

[QUOTE=adam;9547]Where did you get the information on speaker ratings, Rob? That’s news to me, and very humbling.[/QUOTE]

The card deck we get in our speakers bags had the top rated speakers from last year on the cards. You and Bronwen were in the deck.

5

thanks for putting those up!

6

Alright, Adam’s and Keith’s are up.

7

Hey Rob! Thanks for posting these up. I would’ve attended the boot camp if resources permitted. Hopefully this won’t be the last

8

Thanks for these!

Adam really got me interested in hooking out tools up to our existing game metrics database to get some cool user data to get better tools support… Just need some time away from other tasks… :stuck_out_tongue:

9

Hey, we found a bunch of YouTube interviews of TechArtists from Bill Crosbie for GDC 2011. Hope its ok to post a link up here?

10

That link is in the original post already :wink:

11

Hi Everyone,

I’m new to this site! I am finding this site a marvellous place for information and the people on it are all like minded TA’s a bonus!!! The info here is great! I never got a chance to go to the TA boot camp which is a shame, but will hopefully go at somepoint in my life! Have always wanted to go to GDC!

Thanks for posting all this up as am working my way through it at the moment and am finding it great! The interviews are a great idea and its great to here what ther TA’s do in there job! :slight_smile:

12

[QUOTE=Rob Galanakis;9621]That link is in the original post already ;)[/QUOTE]

Erp! Fail…

13

Thanks for posting the link (twice!)

I wanted to say thank you again to everyone who contributed, and if anyone else wants to make a video via a webcam/flip/camera of choice, I’ll add it to the archive. You can use the questions I used. They are at http://blender.rutgers.edu/~bcrosbie/gdc11/questions.html

If you make a video, contact me and I’ll set up an FTP server so you can transfer the file. I can add the titles & transitions and put it in with the others.

If you’d rather host your own video, that’s great too. if you use youtube it would be helpful if you could tag it with IGDAEduSIG techart so that I can find it to direct people to it.

14

I finally got done with my writeup:

15

Sorry for the late response, after GDC I went straight to Shanghai for a week +. I’m just now getting back to ‘normal’ life.

Thank you for the roundtable appreciation, Adam. I need to start audio recording those sessions. I expend so much mental energy keeping the speaking queue straight and keeping the group on topic that I don’t really retain anything that was said. But, that’s ok. I’m not doing it solely for my benefit.

16

[QUOTE=Jeff Hanna;9776]Sorry for the late response, after GDC I went straight to Shanghai for a week +. I’m just now getting back to ‘normal’ life.

Thank you for the roundtable appreciation, Adam. I need to start audio recording those sessions. I expend so much mental energy keeping the speaking queue straight and keeping the group on topic that I don’t really retain anything that was said. But, that’s ok. I’m not doing it solely for my benefit.[/QUOTE]

I wasn’t able to make the roundtables, but I’ve heard nothing but positive comments about them. Hopefully a beefier GDC pass will be in the budge next year. I was however fortunate enough to have attended the TA Bootcamp, and it was 100% pure win. I know that you guys (and one gal) put in a ton of work to make it so… so, thanks for being awesome. :):

17

I don’t have my write-up ready yet, but I did finally manage to post up all the source code from my presentation today for anyone interested (it’s all MIT license). The second of the two videos on my blog post demos most of the stuff I showed during my presentation:

http://adammechtley.com/2011/03/am-tools-1-05-and-unity-maya-extensions/

18

For the people that couldn’t attend the GDC 11 (like me :frowning: ), there is now audio files for the whole Tech-art bootcamp:

http://store.cmpgame.com/product/6205/Technical-Artist-Boot-Camp

19

Excellent, are there any others that you folks who went would suggest as being worth a listen/buy?

20

3.95 for the whole bootcamp. Wow, what a steal.