GDC 2012 Tech Artist Boot Camp Announcement

I'm organizing and MCing the Tech Artist Boot Camp at GDC 2012 in March. The TABC is an all-day Tutorial-format session on Tuesday, March 6, from 10 AM-6 PM.

Below is the session description and list of speakers & topics. We also plan to do a group panel-style Q&A session at the end of the day.

I spoke at the TABC last year, and it was an excellent way to reach out to and share with other industry TAs.  I hope to see you there!

Description
Technical Art is evolving rapidly. In many studios TAs play key roles in developing efficient tools pipelines and ensuring art content is visually striking and optimized for performance. TAs bridge content and engineering helping make both more successful. However, many studios have still not fully embraced the TA role. Their TAs are smart and eager to make an impact, but are not sure how to best prove their value, and be given key roles in development.

A group of experienced, respected technical artists from across the industry would like to invite you to sit with them for a day and learn how to be a more effective TA. Focus on the tools and skills TAs can use to demonstrate their value, and further integrate technical art into their studios' pipelines and cultures. Find the worst development problems at your studio and show them what a TA can do!

Intended Audience
This all-day tutorial is for technical artists and other developers of any experience level. A light focus will be placed on techniques and skills useful to TAs at studios with little-to-no tech art integration and culture.

Takeaway
At the end of this all-day event, attendees will understand key techniques to help them take technical art to the next level at their studios. Learn how to effectively work within constraints, integrate into your teams, communicate with other disciplines, design better code and pipelines, and master new shader techniques.

Speakers & Topics ---

Welcome, Introduction
Adam Pletcher, Technical Art Director, Volition, Inc.

You Have to Start Somewhere... Defining the Tech Art Role and Building Their Team
Arthur Shek, Technical Art Director, Microsoft Studios (Turn 10)
This session will go over the trials of moving from a job in film/animation to a studio with a minimal Tech Art presence and the ensuing panic of change. The Tech Art role has a soft definition and differs at every studio – our common quality is that we are problem solvers, and to problem solve, you must have experience, wide knowledge and the ability to scramble on your feet. At times, what we may feel pressure to know can be overwhelming. Relax - you have to start somewhere.

Better, Faster Stronger: Teaching Tech Artists to Build Technology
Rob Galanakis, Lead Technical Artist, CCP Games
The success of Tech Art has caused a complexity of projects and tools for which our traditional skill set is under-equipped. Tech Artists are now building technology, not just scripts, and our essential growth must be as a cohesive team, not just trained individuals. In this session, attendees will learn how to apply a few key practices of professional software development, such as code review, support processes, and collaborative coding, to the unique environment of Tech Art.

Build it on Stone: Best Practices for Developing A Tech Art Infrastructure
Seth Gibson, Senior Technical Artist, Crystal Dynamics
In this session we present a set of best practices for building Tech Art tools and pipelines in a stable, maintainable, and scalable fashion through the establishment of a solid tools development infrastructure geared toward the specific needs of Technical Artists.

Joining the Dark Side: How Embedded Tech Artists Can Unite Artists and Programmers
Ben Cloward, Senior Technical Artist, Bioware Austin
Technical Artists can be a powerful force to unify teams and ensure that productions run smoothly. In this case study, I’ll show how the simple act of moving two technical artists into the programmers’ working area helped to improve the relationship between art and programming and resulted in a better-looking, more efficient game.

Lessons in Tool Development
Jason Hayes, Technical Art Director, Volition, Inc.
All too often, the importance of planning the architecture of tools and pipelines in game development is overlooked. In most cases, project pressures often give us the false impression that we don’t have time to plan, or worse, we actually save time by “just getting it done”. Nothing could be further from the truth. This session explains why up front planning is important, when to recognize over-engineering and offers architectural design principles for effective tools development-- such as program organization, data design, scalability and user interface design. Internal tools developed at Volition will be used to demonstrate these topics.

Shady Situations: Real-time Rendering Tips & Techniques
Wes Grandmont III, Senior Technical Art Director, Microsoft Studios (343 Industries)
This tutorial session will cover a variety of techniques that can be used individually or combined to solve a variety of game related real-time shading problems. It will begin with a brief overview of the current generation GPU pipeline, followed by some HLSL basics. The rest of the talk will dive into a range of techniques with a complete overview of how each one is implemented.

Unusual UVs: Illuminating Night Windows in Saints Row The Third
Will Smith, Technical Artist, Volition, Inc.
This session presents a holistic case study involving HLSL shader development. Included is not only the problem and its resolution, but perhaps more importantly, an insight into the Technical Artist’s problem-solving mindset throughout its resolution.

Group Q&A, Conclusion

py2exe, Windows 7 & Vista

I don't use py2exe very often, but it can be a useful tool for environments that may not have an existing Python installation.

I recently used py2exe on my Windows 7 PC to build a small tasktray tool. The resulting executable ran fine on my PC (doesn't it always?), but threw an exception on any Vista PC it was run on.

File "win32com\__init__.pyo", line 5, in File "win32api.pyo", line 12, in 
File "win32api.pyo", line 10, in __load
ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.

After more online searching than I'd like to admit, I found a post that said py2exe may be including W7-specific DLLs, when instead it should be leaving those out, forcing Vista to go find its native builds of those DLLs.

I was able to fix the problem by adding two DLLs to the "dll_excludes" list in my py2exe setup script:

options = {
   "bundle_files": 3,
   "compressed": 1,
   "optimize": 1,
   "excludes": excludes,
   "packages": packages,
   'dll_excludes': [ 'mswsock.dll', 'powrprof.dll' ]
}

The tool now runs on both Vista and Windows 7.

GDC 2011 Wrap-up, download

The Technical Artist Boot Camp went really well today. I personally learned a great deal from both the attendees and fellow presenters. Thanks to everyone that turned out, and thanks for all the great questions!

Here is the sample script file I promised in my talk on databases. It's a simple, working illustration of how to use SQLAlchemy ORM to map a Python class to a database table. Please let me know if you have any questions.

GDC2011_AdamPletcher_PythonSamples.zip (2 KB)

GDC 2011 - Technical Artist Boot Camp

Game Developers Conference 2011 is a week away. I'm co-presenting at the Technical Artist Boot Camp, a special all-day Tutorial session on Tuesday March 1.

My portion of the Boot Camp is called "Embrace the Database." Here's my summary:

They may have a mystical aura about them, but databases are far easier to use than you may think. They can be a Technical Artist’s greatest ally in game development, powering your most important tools, gathering usage and error data you’ve never had access to, enabling new workflows and revealing hidden weaknesses (and strengths) in your content pipelines.

This session will also explore how to use Python to unlock the power of databases at your studio. We will look at what databases do best, using practical examples to get you started. We'll discover how Object-Relational Mapping lets you interact with a database in a simple manner that any Python user will already understand.

I'm really excited to be presenting alongside so many talented TAs from our industry. It's going to be packed with great ideas and techniques. If you plan to be in SF for GDC, definitely stop by for our session.

Using Sharepoint Lists with Python

Continuing my tradition of shoving Python into new and unusual places, I recently worked out how to use Python to post items to a Sharepoint List.

We use Sharepoint for some of our intranet needs, and I was experimenting with error-reporting workflows. While I ultimately didn't stick with Sharepoint for this purpose, the Python code worked fine and I wanted to share.

First, a few things to note. Sharepoint uses several SOAP-based webservices as a means of exposing functionality to other tools/languages. One of these is for manipulating Lists, which are Sharepoint's basic storehouse for items that hold arbitrary columns/fields of data.

I was unfamiliar with SOAP prior to this, and ended up using the "suds" extension for Python to help with the formatting. Suds is necessary to run the examples below, and can be downloaded on the Suds SourceForge page.

The "sharepoint" module I'm posting below has basic usage like this:

import sharepoint

item_data = {
   'item_id'   : 32,
   'Log Time'  : datetime.datetime.now( ),
   'Message'   : 'Sharepoint is rather obtuse',
   'User Name' : 'adam.pletcher',
}

sp_list = sharepoint.Sharepoint_List( 'http://sp_server/some_site/', 'Sharepoint List Name', 'domain_name', 'user_name', 'rot13_encoded_password' )
result = sp_list.add_item( item_data )

Walking through the above, first we create a simple dictionary of key/value pairs. The keys are the Sharepoint names for the columns in your list, and the values are the values you wish to submit for your new list item. Then, we construct a Sharepoint_List instance, passing it the site URL, List Name, domain, user and password. Finally, call our add_item method on that object, passing it the data dictionary we made.

The add_item method accepts most data types, including Python datetime objects, as shown. You can easily extend add_item to do something more elaborate.

One thing to watch out for is the list's column/field names used in your dictionary. These must be strings matching the true Sharepoint names of your fields. Even if you rename a column later, it's true name will not change once the list has been created. The only flexibility I currently provide in add_item is the ability to leave spaces in the field names.

I experimented with NTLM as a means of using the current user's Windows Authentication instead of requiring the username/pass each time. I was not successful in that, however... if anyone has success there I'd love to hear about it. As it stands, the Sharepoint_List class requires the username and a ROT-13 encoded password. If you've never encoded anything, here's how to do that from a Python prompt:

>>> 'my_password'.encode( 'rot-13' )
'zl_cnffjbeq'

The complete "sharepoint" module described here can be downloaded below. Adding an item isn't the only thing the Sharepoint lists webservice offers. You can use the framework in this module to do more including edits, deletes and other actions.

Python_Sharepoint.zip (3 KB)