Feedback for ‘Game Job Conference and Resume Workshop’

Next-Generation has posted an article about the conference I spoke at. I was on two panels, and there’s a blurb from me on the second page.

Introduction to ZBrush 2

I wrote this article for the German print magazine Gamestar/dev that I wrote in 2005. It focuses on Zbrush 2 and is in German, so you might not get much use out of it. But if you’re still using Zbrush 2 and speak German, it’s a good read!

The article is stored as a .pdf file. Click on the image below to download it.

PC Games Unreal 2 Tutorial

This is a 2003 Unreal 2 editing article that I wrote for the German magazine PC Games. It’s in German, and you’ll need to register on the PC Games page.

Game Initiative Event

I will be on some of the panels at the San Francisco Game Job Conference and Resume Workshop. Say hi if you happen to be there! In other news, I’m slowly recovering from E3 madness and there should be updates again soon

Gamasutra Article

Gamasutra has a small article about my GDC talk (Gamasutra account required?). Probably the next-best thing to being there – at least for now (you can always buy the procedings ) The article is inaccurate in that Leon was scanned by a Cyberware M15 scanner, not the XYZ RGB scanner I talked about later. There’s some other things I don’t remember saying quite like that, but I guess that just goes to show that what you think you’re saying and what people understand isn’t always the same.

GDC Talk

So I’ve officially survived this year’s GDC talk. If you came here looking for the slides please give me a few days to get everything up to snuff, I’ll make them available for download shortly.
I think it went pretty well if you disregard the fact that I was 20 minutes lates (I have an excuse, but I doubt anybody wants to hear it) and if you consider that I was doing the thing on only three hours of sleep (had to rerender a corrupted movie late last night). I’m looking forward to getting the feedback forms and seeing what people thought. I wanted to make sure that everybody got something out of it, and be it just a lead to a potetial program. Hopefully it didn’t come across too much like an unsolicited sales pitch for CySlice

Update 03/16: Almost there, just have to record some movies demonstrating the programs.

GDC 2005: Normal and Displacement Map, Sitting in a Tree

GDC 2005: Normal and Displacement Map, Sitting in a Tree
Speaker: Matthias Worch (Game Designer / Technical Art Director, Factor 5, LLC)
Time/Date: Wednesday (March 9, 2005) 9:00am — 10:00am
Track: Visual Arts
Format: 60-minute Lecture
Experience Level: Intermediate – Basic familiarity or some experience.

Description: Zbrush, Normalmapping and Virtual Displacement. These days it seems impossible to have a conversation about next-generation graphics without somebody quickly throwing out these and similar terms. But while the tools to get the job done present themselves quickly, integrating them into an efficient production pipeline can be a challenge. Using Factor 5′s art pipeline as an example, this talk looks at the challenges that present themselves as your studio makes the shift into next-generation asset creation. Zbrush, normalmapping tools and the scanning of physical maquettes are just some of the topics that will be touched upon.

Idea Takeaway: Attendees will leave with a thorough understanding of how to tackle the creation of assets for for next-generation games.

Intended Audience and Prerequisites: This talk is useful for everybody who contributes to the visual look of a game: artists, technical directors and level designers.

GDC 2005 Downloads

Powerpoint File (5.7MB)
Movie 01 - CySlice 01 – Resurfacing (15.2MB)
Movie 02 - CySlice 02 – Map Extraction (6.05MB)
Movie 03 - ZBrush Concepts (34.8MB)

The movies were encoded using the DiVX codec.

GDC Lecture Dated

My GDC 2005 lecture is really starting to take shape, with several Factor 5 artists helping me out with demo assets now. I realized that it would be impossible for me to create all the art required for this talk, so Pat, Kursad and Alessandro stepped in and came up with some kick-ass digital content. I will also have the Leon maquette for review, courtesy of CG Toolkit. The talk will happen between 9am and 10am on Wed the 9th. That’s the very first timeslot of the conference, with the Microsoft keynote following at 10:30. Hopefully enough people will be anxious for the conference to start and attend the early sessions, anyway.

Maya2XSI Plugin

There still seems to be a constant stream of people looking for a compiled version of Softimage’s dotXSI for Maya plugin. I’ve been hosting this for a while but never made it public, so here it is: dotXSI4Maya, compiled for Maya 6.0.