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

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.

Volition at GDC 2009

Hey if you're at this year's Game Developers Conference, be sure to check out the talks from my co-workers. Volition has a strong showing this year, with plenty of great tech artist material.

Blowing Up the Outside World: Destruction Done the Next Gen Way
by Eric Arnold and Jeff Hanna
This session presents an in-depth look at the tools and technologies used to make a truly destructible world for RED FACTION: GUERRILLA. The presenters will share the lessons they learned and the problems they had to overcome in order to have destruction in their game.

Technical Artist Roundtable
by Jeff Hanna
This roundtable will be an animated group discussion about being an effective technical artist. Topics of discussion will include what skills a technical artist should possess, how the role differs from company to company, scripting content creation applications, shader development, asset management, and improving production pipelines.

Technical Art Techniques Panel: Tools and Pipeline
Robert Galanakis, Jeff Hanna, Seth Gibson, Christopher Evans and Ross Patel
As game pipelines, their tools, and content become more complex, technical artists have become the developers of choice for much of the planning, overseeing, and implementation of pipelines. Technical artists from BioWare, Bungie, Microsoft, and Volition discuss their solutions and practices for tools and pipeline.

Breathing LIFE into an Open World
by Scott Phillips
Examine the history of populating open worlds and a detailed description and post-mortem of the LIFE system developed by Volition for SAINTS ROW 2. Attendees will learn about the inspiration, organization, methodology, successes and failures of the LIFE system used to add life to the open world city of Stilwater.

Universal Character System in SAINTS ROW 2
by Chris Fortier
Attendees will learn how SAINTS ROW 2's character customization and random NPC generator work. Some things that will be discussed include the universal body mesh, character morphing, normal map blending, layered clothing, shader-based customization features, how we assemble NPCs and how all this character variation affects animation.

On Farming

About a year ago I took a look at Pyro, aka Python Remote Objects. It's an extension package that lets you define code on one machine, and essentially run that code remotely on another machine.

The cool bit is how it hides all the socket and TCP/IP baloney under the hood. It handles connects, disconnects, name lookups, all that. Harnessing something powerful and not needing to understand the gory details is always something I appreciate daily as a Tech Artist. Part of me wants to learn all the inner workings someday. But seriously, I'll probably live a full life and never know.

Anyway, my first Pyro tool was a simple client/server batching utility. A server script would keep track of the slave machines connected and a little job queue, and assign the jobs as slaves became available. I didn't have time to make a GUI for it, but it worked. DOS commands or Python script jobs could be dished out to remote machines and it took very little code to do it. Then I got busy at work again and put the tool aside.

So one of the many GDC 2008 lectures I wasn't able to attend was Life on the Bungie Farm: Fun Things to Do with 180 Servers by Luis Villegas and Sean Shypula (lecture slides). It outlined a system used at Bungie to slave-out time-consuming or annoying processing tasks to a big set of rack-mounted PCs. It could do lighting processing for level artists, regular game builds and verification, whatever.

My first thought was "DO WANT". My next thought was, my little slave tool could make a great start for something much bigger and better. I've done nothing notable on it yet, but I've been turning over details in my head, and hope to find time to expand on it soon.

And to Luis and Sean, thanks for sharing!

GDC wrap-up

GDC 2008 was quite a trip. The two lectures I gave appeared to go extremely well. High attendance and lots of great questions, reactions. Thanks to everyone that took the time to attend, we really appreciated it!

I've posted our slides on the Volition GDC Archive, along with the promised Python Example Files (zipfile) from my Python for Technical Artists lecture. If you're a TA and enjoy scripting, definitely download them, pick 'em apart and do something cool with them.

I wish I'd been able to attend more sessions myself, but between meetings and lecture prep I never hit as many as I'd like.

GDC 2008 coming

I'm in a mad rush to complete my two lectures for the 2008 Game Developers Conference. Every three years or so I forget how hard these are and submit another proposal. What possessed me to do two this year I'll never know.

This year I'm doing one called Python for Technical Artists and another, Internal and Outsourcer Management of Tools and Pipelines. Yeah, that one's a mouthful. Fortunately I'm splitting the second one with TA co-worker of mine, so I can blame him.

I actually feel fairly well-prepared this year. The material is also a lot of fun, which makes all the difference, I think.