Photogrammetry is the Future! So Don't Be Left Behind Featuring Jonathan Holmes | GduX.me

[Music] good for Donathan a longtime friend of the podcast is here to share his story so you're a representative a quick so obviously if people out there have been living out in Iraq we is like seeing that little logo right there on your shirt do you mind kind of sharing a little bit about your resume for people who haven't met you and what you are focusing today on today's talk yeah that's a tall order yeah so my background started in modding back in the cat the command & Conquer days / flight simulation and stuff and then from there I became a military simulation artist and I was a production artist making tanks and the like for the better part of six years straight and that was an interesting job that kind of led me into working at quick cyl in the sense that the first version of d-do was

something that I had to get familiar with to get quick texturing things and then they released the first version of the qixels suite which had a ton of problems and a ton of potential and through working with it and constantly understanding how others worked with it and what their problems were I was able to go to places like polycount just kind of volunteered some time to help out and get people to see hey yeah maybe it's got bugs but here's how you work around them and make a better product so you don't have to be angry you get you can you know resolve these issues that you're running into it's no big deal and one thing led to another and I took an offer of employment just because you know being helpful can pay a lot of dividends and now I've been working at qixels since late 2014 so roughly 5 years so that's me yeah I mean that's quite a path and a lot of these speakers that we have on share one common story is the ability to work from

home or at least work freely and just concentrate on the work it is it is a trend that I hope picks up a lot sooner with everybody that is interested so can you kind of talk about briefly about that we spent like about an hour talking to Colin how he just chosen a place where he wants to kind of set his family which is in Oregon can you kind of talk about your backstory of how you were able to kind of get to that position and be able to kind of work freely and concentrate on just making good art so that's an interesting story in and of itself for most people like the beginning of this story would require like a lot of hard work and that's kind of where mine starts - except mine differs in the sense that I got laid off and that's how I ended up working at home for the longest time I was working part time at click Sol and then working full-time at the office and that was not an

experience I would recommend because I was working something along the lines of 60 to 80 hours a week but it paid off in the end because when I eventually did get laid off from my office job Teddy just reached out to me you know Teddy being our CEO he's like hey you know I know you need a job and you've been working with us for a long time why don't you come work for us full-time which they want to get to do that to begin with so I took the offer and I gotta admit man it was scary I mean working from home is not the same as it is and then say Europe where you can go you don't have to worry about healthcare and things of that nature like your ability to go to the doctor here and not pay an inordinate amount of money is tied to your employer right like you know this because you work in an office or you worked for a company so you know what it's like to be on employer health care well it's even worse when you've got two kids and a wife you got to take care of them too so that's that was terrifying and then when I eventually signed up through the health care exchanges and I was able to just firmly plant my butt here and work at home I

didn't have to worry anymore and I didn't have to wonder about you know how much I hate it going to work it was it was nice it was terrifying but in the end it was totally worth the the ordeal it's the best way to put it the change in scheduling is definitely something to that I want to touch on we're working from home has his pros and benefits especially within the family it's very to convince the life that you are working that you can't do X or Y chores because in reality you would be at office right now like it's something that's right I feel like not a lot of people talking about can you kind of share your experience with that how long it took you to kindly adjust and your family adjusts to daddy or husband is working right now do not block that that is still something that we struggle with because it's I'm very good at masking

what it is I'm currently doing at the time because it looks like I'm playing video games to the kids you know I work on art so to them you know my son's only six years old to him it looks like I'm playing games so sometimes he'll come up and say hey you know can you come play this or something with me you're not doing anything like kid I'm working right now I can't step away from this I have to work like he's actually in the other room right now I had to ask him to be quiet because we had just gotten back from picking him up at school and that's another thing I never got to go do like I would be at the office right now and I wouldn't get home for another probably another four hours it's like almost four o'clock here so I get home super late every night and by the time I get home he's going to bed but I see my kids way more than I ever did and like anyway it comes to like your wife and whatnot or at least my wife it took some adjustment for her to understand innately that yes even though I'm home it doesn't mean I'm available to just get up and do other things all the time I still have obligations I still have things I have to do that doesn't mean I

can't get up and I do like today I was able to walk out front and finish some of the prep work they were doing to the house to sell it which was trimming one of these giant cypress bushes I have again couldn't do that when I was at the office because I was stuck there for at least another four hours so there's a lot of benefits to it and there is a bit of a learning curve where everybody has to adjust that to the fact that just because you're here now it doesn't actually mean you're here you have other things that you need to do so yeah it's definitely a hard sell especially through the children I mean it's hard enough to kind of sell like I make games and and and and kind of sell that in a way that doesn't look like I'm playing games but to kind of be there as well and be like well you're ready there why don't you just play with me it's like now I'm actually this is my job it's like so that's the only thing uh well I mean there are many things but the main thing I not a real fear but what's playful is

like now that you know my both my wife and I myself are working from home right my children are young enough to kind of grow up with this mindset it's like well what is work really I see my parents all the time which is something I hope when they grow up they really appreciate but in reality it's I wonder if it doesn't anything in a negative way we're like well this is what work looks like therefore why am I at work I don't know is it something that you always think it was like how do I teach my children to like they have to work hard first to get to this state to be able to have the the ability and the freedom to do what we're doing which is being a home and and and focusing on the things we want to focus on well that's something that my daughter has issues with right now like she's going through the same path in life that I went through or she's kind of falling behind in school not because she's not intelligent or because she doesn't know the schoolwork or anything but because she's just lazy how kids are

right I was super lazy and I didn't have anybody to hold a fire in my ass to tell me hey you need to do this and I mean I'm gonna level with you right now not a lot of people know this but I'm a high school dropout I had dropped out one month before I was due to graduate and if it hadn't been for my wife I would probably still be the typical dropout with no success working at like a minimum-wage job that I hate as she pushed me to go get my GED to go to college and do everything else that I should have done the game was I just didn't have any motivation and like again like when your kids watch you and they're like oh well yeah you know you've got to this point it's so amazing that you're here what they don't see is the struggle right like you said they only see the end result it took me a lot of hard work to get to where I'm at I had to you know I don't want to say suffer but I had to deal with six years of working in a very very strict type of environment where you're basically a cog machine it's not like like milsim is not like game art we're like yes you're kind of another cog on a machine but you have

more creativity in games whereas milsim you have to make everything exactly to spec every single time you're basically a glorified technician and it was it was rough honestly it really really sucked and then like my daughter doesn't see this she just saw that I went to work and I would come home so she missed out on all these other steps that led to this she just saw me one day oh yeah I'm working home now I got laid off and everything's fine like she doesn't see the I made terrible decisions at one point in my life and these things have all become Who I am like these decisions and choices have made me who I am now she just sees what I did and Who I am not where I came from so I tried to drill that into her like you can't make these mistakes now I've already made them I'm telling you exactly where they're gonna take you don't do that to yourself yeah it's one of those things that I'm consciously aware of it myself like to kind of share and relate to your story it took me a I was spending about a year

over a year commuting to San Francisco I don't know if I ever told you this for a good year and a half there was a really good job in San Francisco I'm located in Orange County so Southern California for anybody that's not a part of California so I didn't want to move back to the Bay Area so I kind of kept my family down here as I was spending the week pretty much going to work like a nine-to-five up in San Francisco so for a good year and a half every weekend I would fly back or commute back to spend time and so it was tough in a non-traditional way of spending time with the family only on the weekends but that whole year and a half was to kind of prep for what I'm doing now to kind of be able to work for myself work from home but it is a it is a hard thing to kind of communicate to the kid because my eight year old well nine year old now just see that like hey for a whole year you've been telling me

that you would work from home after this whole thing is figured out and now that you're home it's like why can't we just hang out more because you're help with home like well first of all you know it took a while to kind of figure this out and now we're at a state where I can work from them and pick you up and all these little things that they'll appreciate later not now but they'll appreciate later and and then slowly if things do go really well then I'll work less and less and then maybe Monday's or Tuesday will be our hangout time or something like that but those are steps that it's hard to communicate to a child that just sees like well you're here why not and sometimes it actually does kind of correct my course a bit we're like looking through the eyes of a child it's just simply like why were you here why don't you hang out it kind of forced me yeah you know what I can take a break right now you want to do something let's do something because we are kind of laser focused and I think making

opportunities for herself to be able to work from home now I think kind of sets our type of personality aside and say like we're very gear focus on accomplishing self-determined tasks but it is really hard for us to kind of prior self away from that and say you know hey enjoy life and then go back to it it's a hard lesson that I'm slowly realizing that's been a struggle for me is understanding when and where to step away right is it's like you there's no real separation from work and when I'm at home so when I'm at my computer I'm usually working even if I don't want to be so one of the things I was looking forward to with a new house that we're getting ready to sell this one move to hopefully something a little larger with a dedicated office is that I can just step out of it and be done I can turn off my phone not have to worry about it and if

I don't want to do anything I don't have to it's been getting closer to that I mean recently I got promoted it clicks a little song now the support lead in addition to community manager in simulation sales and all the other crazy stuff in the tooth but I have a team of people that works with me now so that takes a lot of effort off my shoulders and I can focus on managing them and less on doing the stuff that I was doing which was the more front line person for issues and questions and things of that nature so with moving to the new house it's it's just basically going to make my life a lot easier to finally have that separation that I had when I was at the office and that's something you probably you just discovered or didn't mean David mentioned is that you're running into the same issue you having a hard time separating work and family it's like it's very tough to find that time even though you're home because you still have those obligations and in some ways it's even easier to slip into it because it's there's no real like separation between the two it's just it's very blurred yes and so uh kind of like a

segue to or are the meet at the topic here so photogrammetry is something that I was I feel like I was pretty late in the game so in 20 just to give us some kind of like developer perspective I was a I think it was 2016 when we just finished call duty advanced warfare and we're looking to work on World War two right so this is the onslaught of the revival of the world war two shooters were one shooters with battlefield and so battlefield was kind of ahead of us into using photogrammetry because they were being released before us but then on the ground floor we were finally shifting from using software to create textures to photogrammetry taking images and when I looked at that I was like okay this is a whole different type of mindset this is definitely the future I can definitely also see how environment artists can be resistance in it especially texture artist is like what

do they do now well there's a little a lot of prep still right but that is like a hard slap in the face for a lot of developers and we were in a transitional period so it wasn't guaranteed at that point where this is the way things are going to be so that was 2016 in fast words of 2019 with quick so being the leading software for photogrammetry where are we with this and you being without divulging too much of NDA or any of that sort like artists developers anybody that is a part of game development that is making somewhat of a realistic game where do we need to be with the idea photogrammetry kind of taking over the industry I at the risk of saying too much so I'm gonna try to very very very heavily moderate what I'm about to say there are some groundbreaking things coming in the near future I can't say what exactly I can't say when but if you're not using mega

scan soon I would recommend looking into it it is gonna be the future mega scans is itself just such a powerful ecosystem of tools and textures that you just can't get anywhere else there is no library in the world that even comes close to the level of quality in the level of just assets like just the amount sheer amount that we have we have over 10,000 assets right now and each one of them is scanned in such a way that like they're almost visually indistinguishable from reality and when you throw these things into a real-time engine or even a renderer it's ridiculous how good the quality is for anybody and it's you did bring up a fair point yes you know in the beginning people did kind of look at this like is this kind of like automation but not is this like destroying my job but what's really happening here is that it's opening up potential that we didn't have before instead of having to focus on grunt work

and making the same thing every single time and as you and I both know we've been artists and we've made production art the past that's pretty much all you do you make stuff that already exists how many times if we made a tire how many times have you made a barrel how many times have you made stone or or bricks how many more times did we need to make the same thing before we just say enough we don't need to waste time doing this and that's kind of where companies are getting to with this stuff it's like why are we gonna keep paying for things that already exist when we can just go here get it on the bulk discount and then be done with it and then just give this to the artist to create something with so not to you know monopolize too much here but like on your you know subject of you know artists saying what do I do now it's like well you know focus on creating art unless creating the same thing that you already created before that that's been pretty much like what Teddy calls it as democratizing art and that's kind of what the entire push that we're doing with mega scans is that's exactly what

we've been trying to do is to get away from only triple a quality being something that you have to pay millions of dollars for a studio to being something that you can do as an indie studio or even as a single person the leap that I kind of equate this movement at least from the ps2 the ps3 ps2 kind of had it where the noir map was a big wave of technological shift to the visuals but also to the technique and pipeline of like this is the gold standard it wasn't even until real time GI became part of our pipeline and even now ray-tracing but I kind of equate the mega skin or the photogrammetry movement as finally a huge step from a changing of workflow not so much as in kind of just eliminating jobs it is an automation but just freeing up like you said the ability to just focus on

creativity I think a lot of the stuff there's only so many ways that I want to randomize a rock or rock formation I mean is the same kind of idea where you know I think every environment artists Alisa prop artists have at least a picture in the mind of when they were sculpting a rock and I and that was never never fun and I know we always dived into those tutorials they like how do I make the best rock but it's just so much better time spent doing other creative things to kind of you actually have a huge impact on on the game that you're actually working on oh yeah absolutely and the again it's all about democratizing art it's less about eliminating jobs like if you're if your job is just making rocks then maybe it might come to that point but there's still going to be applications where a rock a needs to be unique and you may not be able to get that with

[ __ ] gas until we eventually scan every rock known to man or every rock on the planet but for the time being if you're still making traditional art or you're making art to order and you don't really have anything to worry about but it's one of those things that like and you'll see this unlike if you're you're an old-school guy you know about polycount I don't know if everybody watching does but there it's a common discussion point in the history of polycount that people will say is using X cheating X being whatever the subject is at the time is using a camera cheating is using Photoshop cheating is using what is it uh is using like DDO cheating is using mega scans cheating there's no cheating the end result is the only thing that matters and if you can get to that end result before the next guy does you have the competitive advantage if you can get to that end result and not waste a bunch of money in the process you're even better off so that's really how it all comes down to you like the art is a goal in and of itself but there's also the business aspect of it

that a lot of people tend to forget and while you're out there making the same thing over and over you're not really proving that you're mastering all these new pipelines that are coming up and like mega scans itself is not going away if anything it's getting stronger more studios you're using it and your I don't want to toot our own horn too much but I do think that you're doing yourself that deserves they don't know at least the basics of working with a photogrammetry workflow it is just faster it's more accurate and it's just honestly to me more fun to spend more time making what I want to see in less time trying to get all that stuff to put together it's like buying a Lego kit and then making what I want to make out of it rather than having to go smelt all the plastic and then put the Lego kit together with all the blueprints to do it you know and I always related to kind of like another discipline that kind of went through the same kind of shift that we we are going through right now the animators when mocap became the standard of how they do things I remember kind of laughing at that being

like hey well I mean I guess it was nice knowing you but in reality it was more like you know there's a lot more work to kind of clean up to make that game ready it was just a good jumpstart to their job not waste time or at least give some inspiration because in a mocap studio a director or anybody that is a lead our animation League can actually direct and get different results without wasting an animators time hand keying all that and so if anything and has helped the process and an animator nowadays wouldn't have to know some type of Lisa a senior professional know that workflow to be relevant to any kind of realistic game environment right so I feel it's the same with the environment artists or artists in general that are using textures in some way that we have to get used to that workflow not in to the extent that we have to clean up photogrammetry unless you're a studio that isn't usually making scans and

using your own photos to clean up sure there is that ask technical aspect to to making it ready but most cases were most likely using a library full of things to apply so there are certain certain differences but I think there's a shift now that most studios would you say are already incorporating photogrammetry if they're making a realistic game how much of a percentage would you say ok a large percent minimum minimum of a large percentage I'd say at least 50 to 60 percent of the major studios are using it I mean he'll if you go to quick sell calm right now the the landing page is the Lion King I mean Disney use The Lion King or sorry mega scans in the production of The Lion King it's like all over our splash screens and everything it's a it's a major accomplishment for us to have been part of such an awesome film and something that so many people have seen yet they don't even know who we are yeah it's it's one of those things it's like maybe the cost of of the license

out not even maybe absolutely the cost of the licensing always outweighs the cost of the artist if it costs I'm in a $500,000 I'm just gonna throw a number out there to license assets to use for a film or a game but you end up getting the same work done and half the time if you had to pay ten artists to do that you're saving yourself a ton of time and you're still employing people to take those assets and put them together and make things so it's not like anybody's being made redundant hell Sene I'm working on right now which is why my face keeps getting lit up and all sorts of stuff because I'm working on unreal as we talk I have saved so much time on this project just by incorporating mega scans into it of course I get it for free because I work here but you know the the point being time is money if I have to go back and make all these assets by hand there's no guarantee that they're egg and I'll look good be be done in time for my personal production timeline or see even just be worth the effort I remember like held that this actual scene I'm working on is my old college capstone project right

and I did this thing over the course of a year like having to build a character animator build an entire solar system scene to animate a camera flying through it and then put it all together with an Unreal development kit scene like really old-school here right UDK like putting all this stuff together in the course of a year before I graduate it so I'd have something to show off to say hey I can I have some marketable skills and yet I'm doing more in like one week than I did in six months just from using my cats why I can't want to talk about this one pivotal point a lot of developers we know two types right one that is embracing of bleeding technology as you should but another that are kind of stuck in this long gamedev cycle especially if it's like 5 to 8 years to complete a game they're kind of used to this one particular workflow that they kind of carry out and eight years pass in the game dev cycle is a really long time it's like two lifetimes where in a

blink of eye you miss out on a lot of new technology so what do you say these are these people who probably haven't touched or heard of photogrammetry because they're stuck in like a blizzard like long dev cycle where they haven't had the need or the the push to actually look at new ways to do things like how do we encourage and how do you feel like these developers don't get left behind but obviously are skilled enough yeah I mean like that I'm sure you know like a certain friends are so resistant to like every new software that comes out and they're still using next normal like a really old baking soft way you know I mean you know what I'm Tess actually I know some people like that right off the bat like I know some people who will not use a better Baker than X normal because well X normals free and what else I already know X

normal therefore there's nothing else that could possibly be better than what I'm already doing never mind the fact that it's almost empirically proven at this point that marmoset toolbag 3 is the absolute best software for not only previewing assets but for baking them I can't think of using anything else and I was resistant to it at first because I'm like how good could I get a tool designed for previewing assets really be at baking pardon my language but really [ __ ] good like phenomenally good like outstandingly good and if I hadn't just taken that time to look at it and be like you know what I need to drop my biases and just look at this thing see what it does play with it and do some test assets I was a mighty bait convert for the longest time I'm like I paid money for this a hundred bucks for this license it's got to be the best out there because I paid for it you know that that sunk cost fallacy people always bring up just because you paid for something at a certain price doesn't mean it's the best thing out there and just because you've been working with it for the longest time or doing it this

way forever doesn't mean it's the best way to work there are objectively wetter better ways to do everything that's one of the reasons why a photogrammetry is such a good workflow because you're just instead of having to replicate things that already exist you just have those things and you just place them in and work with them like you would traditionally except you don't you cut out the asset creation process for the raw textures that you apply to things so what do you say to people who are stuck in that old mindset of well this is the way I've always done it so therefore I'll just keep doing it you have to change and you have to adapt we're not lawyers we're not bankers we're not technicians were artists and artists that are working on the cutting edge have to stay relevant and you can't stay relevant if you just say well the way I did it 10 years ago is the way I'm always going to do it because 10 years ago we didn't even have PBR and you know we didn't have a lot of these other technologies that make life so much easier I mean Unreal 4 wasn't even a thing back then unity wasn't really a thing back then

kind of was kind of wasn't there there's so many like life-changing workflows that we've gotten over the years that have gotten so much better because people have decided to sync the time into learning them and understanding them like 10 years ago even ZBrush wasn't really much of a thing either it was around but it wasn't anywhere near is like capable or as utilized as it is now my box was still something I worked in but I gave it up to learn how to use a brush it's like there's just sometimes you got to bite the bullet and just say yeah I made a choice to learn this but that doesn't mean it's the right way every single time you always have to be willing to learn more you can't just be like you can't think like you're a boomer right right you can't just be like well I mean I'm old therefore I can't change you can absolutely change I'm 35 and I'm still learning new stuff you gotta be willing to do that to be an artist in this industry you have to constantly be willing to change and challenge yourself that's part of the process like I said we're not lawyers if the the laws and the ways we work don't change

every 20 years they change oftentimes every six months even sooner sometimes yeah it's definitely one of those aching pains I think out of all the disciplines environment artists get it the hardest because we're the ones that build the world and it's kind of like kind of kind of kind of showing off our feathers of it but it's true man I don't know any other discipline that has like eight different programs open at once just to do one prop and at some point I had to stop I was like manna because it's great to have that workflows established at a studio where you put in the years where they allow you to have all that software bought so that you can do and be comfortable but as soon as you shift to a different studio you're like how many software's you need day one that's when you start really there I got to convince and have to earn my software and my trust with these guys really shell out like $10,000 sauce software just for me

to get one prop going through so I that's you let's talking about that because that that's the other side of the spectrum where I think we all know that one guy who is on the bleeding edge right on the bleeding head of tech and he has one for unwrapping and he has one for baking he has one for 3d slot we has one for sculpting he has one for texturing he has one for like tile texturing as they alright let's take a step back man let's talk about that sandwich okay yeah sorry about I didn't cut you off there but I totally worked with a guy like that I don't want to name him I'm not gonna say where I worked with him at but this guy he was like he came from ei so everybody thought he was like you know hot [ __ ] like he knew what he was talking about we were all SIM guys so EA has a studio called Tiber on which made all of like the the jungle strike and nuclear strike games if you remember those that the helicopter awesome awesome games but they they're better known for making like the Madden games of the EA Sports

place so like it's like the only game major game studio we have here in Orlando and he came from Tiber on and he came to work with us and all of us being sim drones were like aw man this guy's got to be the best he's got to be amazing well unfortunately that's not always how it works just because you work somewhere doesn't mean you actually know anything or and that's not to be a slight at him he did know stuff he was a good artist but your reputation should not be associated with the company they work with just because you work at big-name studio doesn't mean you're the the best artist out there and it definitely doesn't mean that you your opinions have the weight of gold because this guy like pushed for a ton of software changes in the office we were at and it was like we should use headus if you know what headus is had SUV layout oh yeah a gold standard we're giving you these dude still just sorry to take you off tangent here not really but I won't be logged but it took me a while to get off that software because

it was like by fourth to fifth studio where I asked for it and they had a send like a dongle because it's being run by one guy right and it is like all right that's so far I got abandoned it's the software hasn't been up to I love it but I got to start looking at options so yeah and that was the the problem that we had it's like there was no work flow to be gained no work flow speeds no nothing to be gained from working with headus it was good software it was developed like good people but it doesn't get used anymore and we didn't know any better because we just thought this guy knew everything because he came from EA so that was our mistake so we bought a bunch of licenses the headers and for a small studio this was a lot of money okay like this is almost enough to hire another artist for the price that they were offering and what we ended up doing was like like we never used it we used to like once or twice and it was like for me was faster she just I had a plugin for Mac's that I still use now

paulien wrapper if you've ever heard of that from poly tools 3d comm it 40 bucks for it and it speeds up my ability to do unwraps by a factor of like 20 so I'm able to just do quick planar maps and relax them and toss them into a you know a UV layout and I'm done and like maybe 5% of the time it would have taken me to work with something using headus having to slice up polygons and press little hotkeys to figure out what does what and trying to navigate this this user interface that was made in like 1992 I'm like I can't do this anymore man so like nobody used it but like like you said you get those people that that push for these these workflows and these software and they don't know any better and they just think that the way I've done it is always the best way but sometimes it's not sometimes the best way is just using your modeling package that you you already have like three studio max is something I've been using for god 20 years almost and there's still things I'm learning about it and there's still almost nothing out there that does

unwraps fast at the max in the way that I work I'm sure if I worked with Maya there'd be a faster way than Maya but in max using Max's default unwrap UVW window with poly in a wrapper or augmenting it is the fastest way I've ever done you've ease and I can do stuff on production timelines get like you v's done and 15 to 20 minutes for complex models and they don't look bad so it's it's all about like we said earlier just trying to push yourself to be come better at what you do because like I said you can only be you could be the best lawyer in the world or eight but like we're not lawyers we're artists and artists constantly have to learn new ways to improve because we're fungible you ever heard of that term no what what is that a mixture of so fungible is a term that usually refers to commodities so like when you go by like if you were to put a purchase order down for a barrel of oil a barrel of oil from Canada and a barrel of oil from like

Saudi Arabia are the same thing as far as the markets are concerned wherever you get that barrel of oil doesn't matter because it's always worth the same amount so it doesn't matter where it's come from where it's been sourced as long as it's the same grade of oil it will always be worth the same amount so if I go put a purchase order for 50 bucks worth of oil on the market I'm gonna get 50 bucks of oil and it won't matter where it came from because it's all been mixed together that's my opinion on how we are as artists because I don't want to compare us literally to barrels of oil on the market but more that like we are fungible to employers and we have to be competitive in order to even be employed you can't be employed if you're gonna take forever to make stuff so so a lot of employers artists are a dime a dozen you can always get another artist if one of them is too slow that will replace you trust me I saw it happen plenty of times is a it's a market where the employer always wins so you always have to be the most powerful it doesn't matter how good

of an artist you are that's the difference between other professions and us a good lawyer can fetch a ton of money a good artist can fetch a good amount of money but will never fetch the same amount as another profession that is more like I like to say lawyers would like a good lawyer is gonna always make more money than a good artist that there's no way around that just because the skills are so different and because of the way the professions are in demand you need a lawyer more than you need an artist right and you need like as an employer if somebody isn't performing it's so easy to swap them out for somebody that will and that somebody like a lot of times in triple-a like you don't even need somebody that that is the best ever you just need somebody that can do the job so that's kind of what I mean when I say artists are fungible it's very easy to replace us and it's always important to be the best you can be if you want to be in this field because unless you enjoy being unemployed that can be a very real reality for you if you're not good enough hopefully it all makes sense

you know it totally makes sense men like there's there's definitely a fine line to kind of be proficient or at least on the bleeding edge and a constantly evaluating software that is useful to your workflow but also being mindful of and being adaptable to certain stances where you have to stick to one software especially when you're working in a smaller team or a smaller development team where you can like hey we can afford to software pick your best and you come back with saying like hey I can't do my full thing with just two I need five that becomes a problem and it's something that actually I don't want to turn this into a blender talk but I kind of want to know your opinions on that because that's a software that's kind of been creeping up in the last two years and gaining a lot of ground which finally I have to look into as a possible scenario or alternative to my 3d package where I'm like hey this is a becoming a really powerful it might be the future very soon I need to get on

there yeah you know that joke about vegans it's like you know somebody's a vegan don't worry they'll tell you kind of how I feel people who use blender always like the first people to say oh yeah I use blender hey guess what like nobody's talking about anything and it's suddenly it's like oh yeah I guess what I use blender blenders great I have nothing against I think it's great software I just haven't had the time to spend to learn it because I haven't had a necessity to that might sound like I'm contradicting what I've said in the past but I'm in a position where fortunately I don't need to learn blender if there's no current necessity to understanding or using it in fact I encourage people to learn it as you said it's going to be more relevant as time goes on you and I are both old enough to know the blender used to be kind of a joke at one point none in the song run so way hardest treated it was a joke which was kind of a really nasty thing it's like oh ho you use blender you'll never get higher you're a scrub well that's not the case it's like use what you can work with just because you can't afford a license

to max doesn't mean you're not an artist it just means that you can't afford a license to max so yeah if you can get a free alternative to something and it works just as good and nobody can tell absolutely use it if the free alternative has obvious caveats to it like it doesn't do one major thing that needs to be done that's an issue and if you can't find a way to work around that I wouldn't recommend working with the software but blender has gotten so good lately that like I've seen some stellar art made with it that I would never thought was made with it and that just shows how out of touch I am with blender because I don't keep up with it but everybody I've ever talked to who uses it people I work with on system shock for example I know one of the guys that the lead artist or will used to be lead artist he works with blender non-stop he makes most of his art with blender and you can't tell but it wasn't made with Max or Maya I mean polygons of polygons it doesn't really matter how it was authored as long as it looks good in the end so yeah it's very true and I think they had a similar issue where yeah years ago even

I was making fun of blender because the it was a very hobbyist type of software where anybody can't afford a game development would be easy blunder but they kept on like the founder and the people who supported the community saw the future and potential and it wasn't until recent years we're like very prominent artists and started to take hold of the software and push it to the point where we're like holy crap I can't believe that this is actually pushed out it actually is kind of remind me of the unity problem because at first unity was kind of tailoring towards hobbyists and the people who had the bait with unity logo available we're only using it for a very low level art or at least producing when we think of unity we're thinking of like a low budget at first but it was until recently you know now that they have bigger studios bigger developers a

part of that people are more aware that there are a lot more games made with unity can reach the graphic fidelity as other game engine yes yes and I think blender kind of went through the same type of cycle where it took a while for other developers kind of jump aboard to really showcase the ability of that software and that's what I've been seeing in the last year and a half at least that's a good thing to do it's nothing that we didn't need we need more free alternatives to things we need more people being you know capable of having empathy for those who can't afford software licenses we need people with ingenuity to make those free assets and those free licenses and those free software's to be good competition in otherwise what what alternative really do we have lean it with stagnation there's only so much innovation larger companies are gonna do if they don't have somebody else holding into the fire that's unfortunately reality at the

system that we live in whether you like capitalism or don't I'm not going to get in my position on that subject but ultimately it's like that is the system we live in and that is generally how the rule was played is that unless something is competing with something else the the field of product that is being offered tends to stagnate over time so there's nothing really more to hold somebody to the fire than free alternatives to very expensive software so if nothing else I welcome blender for that because it's a very very good breath of fresh air and a very good step in the right direction for the entire industry to have people with the ability to do trip away style modeling but good stuff that doesn't require a ton of money that there's nothing but good that comes out of that yeah it definitely pushes other 3d packages to kind of step up their game to kind of you know signify why the worth is there the value is there if

there's a free software that does things just as good or better right so it's been a lacking in competition in terms of 3d package so I'm glad in the last year and a half we're seeing kind of like the shift in mentality and all like you said the vegans in the office are kind of laughing at us now because we're going them for expert advice Lee how do you get started in the software that you've been champing for the last five years just talking about years off and now they're like kind of sitting on a high horse gladly because we do need them but it is funny how the tables have turned and that is why I try not to bad-mouth as a software because you never know when you're gonna need someone to help you with it yeah pretty much so being in this industry of ours and with the console shift fastly coming upon us we think that we've seen what the next five years look like with the ray-tracing being powerful enough that

we are handling I think we're still in the cuss about I think people are finally getting a handle on it to make it performant within a game all right I don't know how it's gonna look within a console I don't know we're there yet but photogrammetry being transformative in our texturing techniques like what other adaptation and evolving do you see the industry going and with the let's just call it the PS 5 and the X what's the next Xbox the next Xbox error for game Doug what is it I think they call it internally I think they call it like the scarlet but I don't I don't know the the real name of it yet I don't keep up to date too much with console development so I usually just buy them about a year or two after just to make sure that I don't get a brick you know we how bad we got burned on the 360/ps3 era with all the stuff that just burnt up for now kinesin mm-hmm so I

tend to be a little bit more cautious when it comes to consoles but I can only imagine that they have to compete in the PC market because the titles that are being developed for PCs oftentimes we're also being ported or being ported from PCs right so it's not like we are we were with the Bioshock here we're like stuff is being made for consoles and then ported over to PCs largely these days everything is basically made to the same specs and just consoles tend to run them at lower specs but large like most people can't tell the difference unless you're like right up in the screen so I don't really see it being much of a paradigm shift I think what's gonna end up happening is you're just gonna get better visuals and you're gonna end up playing most of the same games except for the stuff that's always console exclusive like well up until recently like the Ace Combat games for example like GDC 2018 I got to go play the seventh one like before it got released and it's like I couldn't

believe how awesome that looked on a ps4 I can only imagine what Namco is gonna do with you know the next day's combat game on a PS 5 like I couldn't even believe they put in on PC but like that just shows you how interchangeable this stuff is today like the PC version looks pretty much identical to the ps4 version even the ps4 pro there's not much of a difference between them so yeah it's gonna be very tough as these consoles are getting strong and stronger to kind of differentiate there's always gonna be I think the hardcore people that will be able to tell the difference between a $2,000 rig versus a $500 console oh yeah but through the regular consumer I don't think there would be much of a difference because that's all they really see therefore if there's an upgrade on the PC they're just glad right but they're not really comparing which copy am I really getting because most people don't have like $2,000 rigs so mmm and that's another issue with with consoles too to wrap up the subject than that it's like there's not much of

a difference between them I mean they're basically pcs these days like I mean I saw up what was it I'm breaded somebody had taken a ps4 and put Windows on it yeah so it's what's the difference between that and a PC it's just a box that's already been it's like it's a pre-built PC that you connect to your TV that's pretty much all it is so and that it also happens to have like exclusive games so ultimately there's really not much of any major difference yeah development wise I think everybody kind of breathe a sigh of relief one PS PlayStation the Xbox is decided to kind of make theirs boxes really similar because during the ps2 and what there's 60 days ps2 was not ps2 was a ps3 now ps2 yeah PSD was a pain to develop for yeah because of Google is it ps3 I thought ps3 they kind of the 360 was competing with the ps3 and rise three had a weird architecture right you never

able to grout it right right right and they fix it with the ps4 yeah on the console side on the development side it was a pain because we were constantly kind of running into problems and 360 became like the base platform to kind of figure [ __ ] out and then the ps3 was like whatever's left over poured it it's just make it run yeah there was you sacrifice a huge yeah the Sony brain is strong but like I mean these are the shifts that we've seen on the technological front and as we mentioned before the photogrammetry I think is already established enough that people are at least working on these Triple A franchises are finally embraced I'd in the last game the last big game that came out was something even already voice when we had him on the podcast where it was the God of War where they were still sculpting rocks and doing that a lot by hand but I think that was

the last the last major big game or major studio that hasn't fully embraced the photogrammetry as the way to go oh everybody's gonna embrace it eventually there's it's the way of the future just like PBR or was the wave of the future eventually everybody will come over to it it's just it's a cost-effective proven that a method to work I'll share my screen with you if you want to see the the project that I'm currently developing and oh yeah do it this was I actually let me show you my call it's my college capstone first and then you can kind of get an idea of just how much this thing has actually changed over the years so this is what it used to look like okay so this is UDK super basic like this was what I meant when I talked about photogrammetry as improving my workflow these textures like this this bark this up here like the dead fronds these fronds themselves those are all pictures I took when I lived in Tampa at

the apartment complex that was at going to school these philodendron sear the the bark on this Palmetto bush all that stuff like I literally built doing a really Craven these elephant areas crude photogrammetry workflow like just taking pictures and using the original version of nd on it and then turning it into a normal map that's where I was and that's why I look at that being so amazing because now I've got this and I did all this in a week and it took me close to like several months to even get that the same area done building it all by hand like I took clicks a mixer or one of our texturing tools that you can use to blend scans together and created this tileable floor which doesn't even use a displacement it's just like tracing over the Geo or tracing over what would have been displaced using Mac's so there's using hard edges and whatnot and then softening the normals and then same thing with this wall here too

so like I've taken the photogrammetry workflow that we use in mega scans and I've just put it into my pipeline for my personal art and what I've done is I've taken all the stuff that I had to make by hand before that I was gonna take pictures of anyway and then put that into a scene wherein I didn't have to make all that stuff and I was able to get to the end result that I wanted to get in a much reduced amount of time trying to find the best way to put this it's like it just it just looks better by by orders of magnitude it's faster by another order of magnitude and the end result like I get to it and I don't feel like I'm stressed out I just enjoy the creation so I put more effort into the other details that I might have been too tired to focus on like these we call it like these uh bits of fog on the sides that are rolling in kind of like the sfa don't you know like during the evening hours or something just little little tiny details that I would have missed before I'm not even like 20 percent done with this I have like trees and stuff I need to add up here but it's so much faster to work this way because I can

just focus on putting these pieces and then I want to put in rather than having to make it all by hand yeah definitely I have as you are kind of I know you kind of help with the technical bugs in anything that customers of quick Sulli hit you up on but like I I wonder to what the kind of reasoning behind studios that don't want to go fully on board with photogrammetry could it be just they think they want to create their own library and they don't want to do mega scandal what are the main some of the priority prior reasons on why they are not fully sold on this workflow so I don't wanna get too much into it because some of its like proprietary and those that these studios have given me so I can't really just talk about it but as a general overview a lot of what it ends up being is price and that is one

of the biggest hurdles that you know anybody has like you know when you're an artist into trying to convince your boss to let you work with the newest version of whatever you want work with if like say you want to work with tool bag and do baking in there and sort of happened to rankle around X normal do you know how fast it works and you know the price difference between having to sit there and wrangle with X normal and the amount of hourly wages you're gonna spend doing that versus just getting the bake the first time and tool bag is gonna pay for itself the first time you bake something but your boss doesn't know that because they may not understand the intricacies of what you do as well as you do because that's what they hired you to do the problem with that is like oftentimes these companies will reach out to you know the I'm not gonna name names again but they'll want to license and then we give them a quote and I'm like well this is too expensive because it doesn't it doesn't fit with what we thought and then what I end up saying is well imagine paying an artist to make everything and the amount of time it would have to take to get all this stuff built and then hope it actually reaches

the same level of quality and hope that it reaches the same timelines that we have because we offer instant access right you don't have to wait you don't have to wait for the artists to build these things to order you already have rocks you have components for trees you have dirt if grass how we vent swamp water oddly enough there's all these different things you could put together that are already ready to go right out of the box you put them into your scene you put them into unreal unity your favorite renderer or whatever it is that you're working with you just cut out that middleman of time and you also cut out that middleman of uncertain expectations because you're an artist and I'm an artist and you know that we don't always make everything perfectly but when you have something scanned exactly the same way exactly the same methods used every single time you can always be sure that it's going to be perfect that it's going to slot into what it is that you're trying to work with that you don't have to worry about whether or not there's massive black splotches it maybe you missed when you did a bake or your movies are stretched or skewed or something because you're trying to rush through it and get it done there's always hidden benefits that

a lot of companies don't see when they look at these things and that's even just true with any texture library in general it's like you're paying to have these things done you don't have to worry about it you can integrate them into your end result you're not paying so much for what's what's the best way to put it you're not paying to replace people you're paying to just get to that end result faster yeah and I definitely agree with that I think it's often overlooked or underestimated how long it takes to prepare something to finally get its use in especially having a library that you can drag it drop essentially to make your game look good right now is something that I think everybody appreciate to get to the next level for sure if not get on get on them with the program because I feel like every three five years this is this there's like a wash that happens where the old devs that are resistant to change are facing newer and younger developers that are embracing change

especially coming in with newer software that already improves their there their momentum of being young and then and and ready to kind of just work hard and grind that's where the danger shifts for a lot of developers that I know that just are just very slow or resistant to to everything that's happening so that's why it's a subject that I feel like every three five years no matter what it is photogrammetry lighting or anything of that sort that developers need to really be careful on and just be okay I think of anything if you have time to Lisa I'll look into these type of new techniques new tools to see if it's useful or not that's fine but at least be aware of it so that when the new the new the new HAWX hotshot comes in the

office you can keep up right that's the scary thing where I feel like a lot of these developers are just completely shocked and so behind where it's hard to at that point to justify their higher salary sometimes it's like well you are supposed to be the best here and we're paying you double of this new kid who is able to do the work in one fourth of time what's going on so that's the conversation that happens a lot that I always warn developers about especially with new things happening I guess we're probably get ready to close up here soon but one of the things I would I would recommend to everybody listening don't be one of those what I'll just come out and say it one of those old fogies and art we're looking like everything you're doing now is cheating if you're trying to improve your workflow and you're using asset libraries or whatever it's cheating there is no cheating and getting art done it's the same like principle and warfare and love right there's no cheating and that either it's

like everything is fair if you can get to that end result and you can get there before the other guy competing with you for your job absolutely do it if it's illegal I mean yeah make sure it's legal I mean yeah you know don't go murder somebody to make your art faster or something but if you can use a texture library to get to that end result and it makes your work that much better do it there's no reason why you shouldn't if you have this misplaced or not Amane rephrase if you have a sense of honor or dignity or something that prevents you from using asset libraries try to get past that it's really nothing more than a personal limitation because you're gonna find that not everybody shares your personal code of ethics on these things and using an asset library is not cheating there's no way it could possibly be you can as such because if every tool that comes along that makes your job easier is cheating then you have to go all the way back to follow the logical route of that argument which is using a computer is cheating because there's no other reason why it would be if you're old enough like me I'm 35 I remember when people

would complain about making art on the computer like you're not a real artist if you if you use Photoshop only real artists use paintbrushes and you're not a real photographer if you use digital photography you're only a real artist if you go and develop the film yourself in a darkroom that you built in your basement I'm like yeah the gatekeeping has got to stop if you venture will but like don't be like that like if it makes your job easier and it's legal do it there's no reason other than artificial handicaps and trying to earn respect of people that may not even care like no I'll give nobody that I've ever shown my art to who doesn't work in this industry cared that I did it with mega scans they carried that the end result was done my bosses have never cared that I use mega scans and the work that I work developed they cared that the work was done if you if you can say that you did it all yourself that's if that's how you want to work go for it but don't look down on other people because they use tools and

things that make their job easier because ultimately that's the whole point of being an artist it's finding better ways to do these things while improving your visual quality it's not about trying to suffer just so you can make it take ten times Hart longer and say well I did it all myself therefore it's the best it's like if you'd like to work that way that's fine there's nothing wrong with that but don't don't think that like don't fall victim to that trap that is a method of thinking that doesn't really get you any further with your career and I should know because that was one of those people hell but I was in in the wrong direction like I was like why would you ever work on personal art like I already work all day long why would I want to come home and make more art because if I could go back and slap like twenty five-year-old me a little bit I would I would say because you need to stay relevant that's this is the profession you you enter it it's a competitive profession there's nothing you can do about that except this stay relevant if can't stay relevant you're gonna get replaced because there's always people

coming up now who would love your job definitely so any tool said I definitely sign off on that that's gonna improve your workflow and stay competitive in a legal way highly encouraged so don't go out there and start breaking fingers so Jonathan thank you for coming on and joining us with gdug this is an enlightening talk it's something that I feel every 3-5 years like I said there's a changing of tide and you either with it or without or being left behind right so these are wise words I highly highly encourage any artists or developers out there to constantly think about being relevant and thank you if there are if there is a way that listeners and viewers out there can reach you or follow you where would that be if you want to look at my personal art it is art station comm slash then it's easier which is difficult to type so

just look up Jonathan Holmes on art station you'll find me I have a big goofy grin it's very tough to not see it I regularly post work that I make there at the scene that I showed you guys haven't shown it outside of quick civil I hopefully I'll be done with that within the month so that'll go up there soon I usually do breakdowns and how I do this stuff so anybody who wants to learn or is just curious or just wants to know how I did some of the stuff of glad to share I love helping people out because you know when I was younger I didn't have the same resources that weren't tutorials everywhere for everything if there were it was like a really basic tutorial it kind of like sucks you know what I'm talking about so it's like having the ability to learn from other people is so important and being but sharing that knowledge is too so like if you take anything else out of this conversation that we're having and like just try to be a good person then just share the knowledge because we all came from somewhere and nobody knew everything being born and if you can help other people you're helping yourself and it's like that's really the

reason why we exist is to make the world better for everybody else not to forward information and and just try to hold that competitive advantage if your work is good it's gonna speak for itself your work isn't well there's not a lot you can do about that except try to improve and they only would have improve is to learn from others if you can't learn from others well or at least the least you can do is try to you know teach you know teach other people what you know so that other people have an easier time of getting to that point it doesn't mean you're teaching them to take your job it just means that you're making friends and connections that's the kind of thing that you need to be a good artist it's not just the work it's also being a good person and having that network that supports you what you need help just like you help them awesome well Jonathan it's been a pleasure it's always fun kind of sitting there with you and kind of going through this always make me feel a little lazier after today every time we try it is you're always having new artwork of is like oh man I need to be relevant

Jonathan's gonna take all my jobs but I want to thank you and I'm on behalf of everybody that's viewing for your time we are definitely going to follow up with your journey and your heart station and follow you and other social platforms if you have pointed out and thank you so much man thank you definitely good I probably hear you back on our podcast it sometime I'd love to be back you guys are always a pleasure to hang out with of course man well thank you Jonathan I'm gonna let you go and see hi to the family for me the odd are be odd greeting it's like Brandon said hi who the hell's brand that works too [Music] you [Music]