A Postcard from GDC

As mentioned earlier there won’t be any online material from the GDC talk about Lair, but Victoria just got some pictures developed that she took during that time. Here’s one of me setting up before the talk. See, it’s almost like you’re there! No? Not really you say? Ah well…

GDC Slides?

I’ve received a few requests for the GDC 06 lecture slides, and as much as I’d like to do that – the truth is that there just isn’t that much to release! The Powerpoint itself was only about 10 pages, the rest was life program demos in XSI, similar to what I did in 05. Last year I compensated by recording videos of what I did, but that won’t be possible this year. I’ll look into what can be arranged, but in the end the demo was one of those unfortunate “had to be there” affairs, I’m afraid. Sorry!

GDC 2006

Well, that was an interesting GDC for sure. Take one part San Jose, one part company demo/deadline, two parts moving, and mix it with a healthy dose of GDC lecture. Bake it for a week and you have this year’s crazy schedule.

We’d been working on an internal Lair deadline that dragged into the wee hours of the GDC week, so when I arrived in San Jose on Wednesday morning I’d only had 8 hours of sleep for the last three days. Oh, and my talk – the talk that I had started mid-January to avoid any GDC stress – that talk wasn’t finished yet. I spent most of Wednesday in my hotel room – sleeping, working on the lecture and enjoying Victoria’s company, who had come down for emotional support.

The lecture was on Thursday morning, and it went over really well. The talk description hadn’t made it into the conference schedule (not even the white sheet addendum they add to the bags!) and I was worried that not many people would come. I mean, would you get to the show at 9 in the morning for something you didn’t even know existed? But surprisingly I had a full house and people had to be turned away at the door. Okay, it was a small room. But it’s still a nice feeling to have. I showed two Lair demos on my PS3 devkit and looked at various production assets in detail, fielded questions and even managed to finish on time (that’s a first for me!). From what I hear the feedback has been very positive, and Softimage seemed to be happy with it, as well.
After the talk Victoria and I drove back to Sonoma to move in some of her stuff because Vicky’s dad had come down to bring/hook up the washer and dryer. I unloaded some boxes, stopped by my (soon to be old) apartment to take care of the birds and drove back to San Jose for some…uhm, sophisticated GDC partying. Level 99 was fun, got to talk to some interesting people and got to catch up with my old boss, Bob Bates. Me and a bunch of F5 people tried to go to Bioware/Pandemic’s event next, but apparently the line to get in went around the corner of the building, and that didn’t seem to be worth it. We went straight to the GDC suite instead for more beer and socializing. I think I got back to my hotel room around 4 in the morning. Details are sketchy

On Friday I got up early to catch (most of) Clint Hocking’s talk (after all I’d gotten used to the 4 hour sleep thing), quickly walked the show floor to meet up with some (but not all) vendors I wanted to visit, and left San Jose early to drive back to Sonoma. More moving. We’ve started with my apartment today. I’ll hopefully have some pictures of the new house soon!

All in all not a bad GDC, but I’ll be damned if this wasn’t some of the most stressful time of my life. I met my share of cool people and got to see some cool stuff, but only managed to attend two sessions. Next year will have to be a lot less stressful again!

GDC Talk

Softimage have published their GDC 2006 plans, among them the Visual Arts talk by yours truly:

FrankenDragon Flies Again! Creating Playstation 3 Art for Lair
Special Guest: Factor 5.

Location: Room C4
Time: 09:00-10:00AM
Presenter: Matthias Worch

A big part of the industry now knows what it means to create “next-generation content”, but many lessons that come with the new workflow are still learned the hard way. In this presentation, Matthias Worch from Factor 5 looks at the highly detailed creatures and environments of Lair, Factor 5′s upcoming Playstation 3 title, and how Factor 5 used SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.5.0 to solve various problems that cropped up during development.

About Factor 5:
Based in San Rafael, California, originally founded in Germany in 1987 and privately held, Factor 5 LLC is a leading developer of interactive entertainment software and technology for a variety of console and computer platforms. Among the company’s many successful titles is the multi-million selling Star Wars®: Rogue Squadron™ line of games for LucasArts Entertainment Company and the classic Turrican® series.
With the imminent arrival of the next generation of console and handheld technology Factor 5 has multiple game and technology projects in production for major console manufacturers.

For more information, visit www.factor5.com

Hope to see you there. The GDC page should be updated soon, as well.

GDC 2006 Talk

GDC. And Me. Thursday morning, 9:00am. This will be a sponsored session by Softimage and the talk description hasn’t been updated yet on the GDC page, but I will be doing another talk about asset creation for next-generation (Playstation 3) games this year. And this time I get to use lots of Lair assets for examples! Hope to see you there.

Returning to the Scene of the Crime

I wasn’t planning anything for this year (my proposed level design panel got turned down), but another visual Arts GDC 2006 lecture is looking like a distinct possibility now. More details 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 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.

GDC 2005 Lecture

My talk has been officially added to the GDC page! (Much) more later.