The Convergence of all Entertainment | Best of 2021 Part 2

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hey what's up everybody welcome to another episode of game dev unchained the number one game development podcast about game development and the lifestyle thereof i am your host brandon pham and i'm back at it for a part two of five series highlighting the best of 2021 this week every day there's going to be a new episode out each episode this week will concentrate on a particular topic that is setting our future for the next 10 years so the last episode was about how the pademic obviously have changed the industry forever and this one is further exploring what it means to be a game developer nowadays pushing the envelope and the boundaries of allowing game developers to move across movies enterprise architecture whatever it may be

so what's been happening the last five years real-time workflows are being adopted by everybody that is outside the game industry the response rate of real time is a great factor to why that is happening so these are all things that have been blossoming and in the past year especially the convergence is here in the movie industry we're already seeing a lot of virtual production like how on the mandalorian the unreal is being used to make the backdrops live and on these led light screens uh it's actually lighting the actors and the set and is multi-purposeful for not just visually compelling but also practical as this was a major factor to how the mandalorian season 2 was made while the whole industry was being shut

down this allowed the show to keep going on uh because they don't have to go on different location set they had a very protected and cost effective warehouse with this virtual backdrop and they were able to continue working as as uh as needed so it's a very exciting episode and we talked to a lot of people uh to kind of illustrate to you listeners out there why this is important for anyone that is looking to get in the game street who are already in the game history and are looking at ways to broaden the tools and strength that they already developed to help other things that is not particularly about games so for this uh for this first episode i was able to sit down with mauro frau

who is the ceo of treehouse ninjas and is one of the uh creative partners with unity that helped brought the tech demo the heretic to life so using unity they were able to make a lot of progress that used to only be exclusive to just the film industry so if you missed it last year go ahead and listen to this highlight but if you are interested as always check the full episode 259 the convergence of games and movies with mario frau i would love to kind of hear uh you kind of retracing those steps that you talked about and and what is that future when it's not exactly games and it's not exactly a movie it's going to be its own thing and it's kind of writing off of what you're saying about ar powered entertainment right once they figure out the battery problem it's going to be a

whole set of different directors a whole generation of content uh makers to make this third lane possible yes i think it's uh it's a it's an interesting limbo that uh it also comes from this this sort of sad realization of seeing movies especially mainstream movies really being over and over same same same saying right and it's just like sequel of sequel and prickle and signal and then eventually you're watching the same soup reserved and reheated um and games are not yet there it's a it's a younger medium but i i don't think they're too i mean they're sort of in the same trajectory there are lots of lots of products that are sort of starting to to feel like lacking ideas and going for scale rather than rather than you know novelty um so seeing both games and movies you know endangered by this saturation of

contents it's cool to see that they might you know gain from each other uh the best ingredients that they have and and then have this like hybrid future where where they would influence each other and you know the the choose your own adventure kind of situation is is a bit of the most probably the first idea that would come at mind um but if you think about it like in the moment when we have a movie that is already being shot in a virtual environment like because imagine that is it's been fully realized inside of an existing virtual world that is fully photorealistic and the crew was on in the world when they were shooting uh in the moment that that data is actually to say um affordable to run in home computer systems and today home computers are insanely powerful um you might want to you might have just

think of reproposing the movie world for the audiences to use to step in you know imagine like you watch a movie and you like it and then you just like walk inside of it back again this is why in the talk i've been mentioning a crazy thing as like um emergent movie making which would be like movies made with multiple things happening i don't know if you remember a movie like for example like went in tarantino it was uh four rooms and altman those uh like postmodern directors of like the 90s they were experimenting a lot with telling you the same story from multiple perspectives and it was so interesting right you would discover certain things about a story but then eventually they would tell you the same exact story back in time and we will tell you what was happening in the same moment but in the in the next room and and you would figure out element including ingredients of the same story they would just like twist your reading

of the same story so we might want to just think of movies that are crafted that way with the idea of like well me as a director i give you one take on the story but then you as an audience you step in and you make you your own movie or you just you know just like exploit the world more um it's an idea that actually puts its roots in ex sandbox games or in even stuff like dreams or even micro minecraft when it's not just about what we as content creator force you to experience but he's also giving you something that that you can pull out something out of it with your own hands as a player as an audience um so it is hybrid the situation that that is that is very attractive and that's also about the reasons and the spirit behind having set up these three house ninjas studios and having

tried to keep it hybrid with people from movies and people for games and see if we can get an edge over you know embracing these these thoughts and catching trains that might pass and they might be very invisible to the most people and maybe we can try as an independent studio experimenting things that you as a corporation you really cannot yeah it's huge well i would love to kind of dig into that a bit you get you mentioned you you got a group of your friends and colleagues together to to experiment you know to to pave the future you're a very introspective guy obviously a lot of your thoughts are very intriguing i i wish we had more uh dedicated game developers thinking like this because i do think i've said it many times on the podcast if there were if wherever were to head towards the matrix right which is the ultimate uh not goal but i would say the danger right it would be a game developer it would be powered by unity or unreal

right that's that's that's really you know everything's converging to that point um but uh i believe you guys are in hungary budapest we are yeah okay so like how did that did you have a background in creating startups like that must have been an adventure in itself right i would love to kind of okay yeah yeah yeah um well um i mean that's where where uh my partner zoltan comes at play because he he's a he's the producer right i'm i'm the creative director he's the managing director so this is that kind of stuff when somebody asks me lots of people obviously dream about having their own studio and setting things up and i always suggest if you're an artist really consider uh partnering with with somebody that is a production person somebody that has that mindset we we are two archetypes of brains that are very different the artist is the artist the producer and the manager is the producer and the manager we find

ourselves collaborating a lot because we need to understand each other needs of course and that takes a lot of experience for an artist to get into the production mindset and for a production for the producer to get into the artist mindset but in general i i can't imagine you know dealing with all the the classic bureaucratic taxation laws and things uh not to mention that my hungarian is literally non-existent so i wouldn't even be able to handle handle it um so it was very lucky that we met and we we got in line with many of the basic principles that we believe into in what makes a working environment uh successful and motivating this is a bit behind the what's behind the name of the company which is treehouse ninjas right it's a bit of a synthesis of a treehouse it's a it's a place that is welcoming you know it's a place where you as a kid you want to be

in it inspires you some nice vibes uh and and uh but at the same time ninjas is what brings back that kind of dimension of okay but we are people delivers you know you know just like uh youngsters playing around with things uh we know our stuff so i guess this it was this lucky alignment of planets the the soft stars that uh we decided to go for it he we were tired about the same things of our previous experiences at work and we say let's let's let's just forget about corporate environments together and set up our own thing i see like i would love to hear more of your background i know you you came from both movies and games before treehouse ninjas and you guys are i'm looking forward i'm watching you guys because what you are talking about what you you get you know the spirit behind trius ninjas i really do think you're you guys

are the trend centers uh for for what what's next um and like you said i i i do really believe it's like the smaller studios that are always innovating and um [Music] you're a little bit special man like when i saw your talk was i this guy really sits down and thinks about these things that's most game developers think about uh you know the next paycheck or going home right but like yeah you think so yeah well i feel like most of them i mean like maybe outside of engineers and designers it's more about the next project and like a game idea but to kind of take 10 steps forward like you do at least from what i thought in that talk he's like wow he's really thinking about the future of entertainment like in a way that's probably what's sticking around with corporate environments that just drives you to to you know like because the brainpower that i experienced around me in both gaming movies is insane like i've been sitting in environments where i would feel that the combined brain powers of the

people around me was was ridiculous ridiculous that we were applying it to think we could have like been working on the first man of mars if we really converted this brain power than something else yeah i really believe that i i think you know everyone's like champing rightfully so elon musk and all his like you know his next idea what he's working on and of course the biggest talker now is ai and when i look back at engineers and games it's like my deal we've been creating ai's forever doing like stupid stuff on on the streets of gta but it's just you know that's what that's what we put our efforts in into entertainment but i feel like the same people would be on the bleeding edge of you know uh worldwide technology if they were applying in these tech companies with the same knowledge and i do actually have friends uh that were engineers and gains that are working at these ai companies after you know layoffs or

deciding to move on you know so it's i do see that transition of if we wanted to apply outside of entertainment our skill set which we are seeing with what you were saying with the virgin moving games like you know knowing unreal knowing on unity before used to be for games but now i see people at tesla people at google facebook doing the same thing that you were doing before but with a different purpose and it just makes me feel really proud that game developers are are having that security first of all but also uh having influence outside of just games uh and it's not to devalue games games are super important and i think if anything we still need games to push the innovation and then apply those tools elsewhere uh i do think in other areas there seems to be a limitation because if anything i i'm sure you know engineers they're really bored at these tech companies all the time fixing email notification codes at netflix or

something like mundane and slow uh yeah and it seems like the the the growth happens when they're working on games the most that really pushes uh the limit yeah yeah yeah that's a double legend thing though anyway the the a lot of the layout i mean just like all the business about crunch never-ending talks about unionizing what not a lot of that also lies in the how desirable the claim the the creative uh spirit behind the game industry and movie industry you know this attractiveness of of the entire the entire movie and game production uh it brings in so many fresh young talent that is sort of how to say um so much soaked in illusion um that eventually it's illusions of being hyper creatives

and and sometimes you don't realize that you what you're facing is an actual job you're gonna be told what to do and you're gonna have to execute it right and uh you're not necessarily gonna be doing everyday things that you like and you're not gonna necessarily be putting your own personality and creativity in it so this is why i say it's a double-edged sword right because sometimes this this other jobs that in other jobs i would say that they're a little bit more boring it's easier to say i'm gonna go home at six right i i i don't put i'm not putting my heart inside of this thing yeah you know like putting your heart can go out of control sometimes and and bite you in the ass if you think about it oh yeah i think uh i think i've always attributed with office politics with being in the office now that the whole world is remote

uh i'm i'm also seeing the opposite effect of people overworking to their own detriment right because our computer's right there i didn't get to this one thing earlier today but now i can and i'm finding myself and others they're working more self-imposed rather than a producer telling us to do so which is another surprise i i didn't really think would be the case um yeah even even working from home for a while before the pandemic uh i now i'm starting to see that oh okay so creativity it just kind of needs that i think sometimes uh because it strikes us when it strikes us right it's not a clock and clock out type of thing yeah yeah yeah dangerous yes i'm horrible at that i'm horrible at i live plus i live in a in an open space apartment so i don't even have a door the computer is looking

at me from the other side you know constantly and if i think thankfully in hungary we don't have uh uh super strong restrictions we are now working from home but i can i basically brought back my workstation at the office and i go there i'm alone working at the office but i go there and i find concentration and then when i detach from job i am back home and i don't have a computer home uh i'm really bad at doing that yeah i'm managing that properly in this next episode to further push what game tools are doing for other industries uh we i was able to talk with luis corell so lewis corral spent a good portion of his recent years at houdini uh to kind of help develop game tools to push the envelope for proceduralism he's currently at rockstar but

his main thing and what the industry have been seeing is that these tools are great and seeing real-time feedback is great and the but the biggest worry has always been how big that this team has to be to support the creative freedom that these directors and um creative directors are having so being effective with the small amount of people that you have around you is the only way to balance out this ever changing ever growing landscape of what it takes to bring triple a quality and be financially responsible and what luis carrill has been doing and tech artists around the world have been pushing for is letting ai and proceduralism do a lot of the heavy work so that our time as artists can be dedicated to

coming up with creative solutions so this episode is from 263 proceduralism in games with luis carrell please enjoy i think the key word that you just talked about iteration is kind of symbiotic to game development and it's the number one reason why game development sometimes takes longer than planned right because the iteration process either is too slow and it goes through this eighth or z process before being spit out again and then critiqued and then it goes back into the weird circle my my my thing with game development is like it's never it's never the tools it's always the ideas right but hopefully this minimizes the feedback necessary to kind of get a stamp of approval because it's so fast it's like you're in real time now and you can change things on the fly

where an art director uh can can can be there with you and hover basically it's a dream come true uh so i think yeah yeah just to jump on that one real quick the that's what i was gonna comment on the the promethean stuff too and that's honestly the biggest challenge we've had uh with procedural stuff is how do you art direct it how do you get someone to sit behind it and be like like 20 over here like that that tree like that tree over there like pluck it out and move it over here where i want to swap that one and it's like well it's kind of like this giant system and we just built everything and if you change that one if you regenerate it you lose that like that's the whole point of it um so kind of how to art direct proceduralism is a a kind of open problem and there's different solutions on how to do it but it is an interesting one and and to your point the goal definitely is and i think like when people ask to define a pipeline is basically like what is your tolerance to change and how fast can you iterate on something so if i say if i look at a game and i'd be

like there's a seam on that rock how long does it take for you to give me that fixed if it is something that you can be like oh i can just click on that rocket content browser export it send it to something export it back and bake the textures and you're done and that that's even more complicated than it probably needs to be but that's a pipeline it's basically like if i don't like that coffee cup or coffee cup how fast can you make something about it and i think the idea which is where people are starting to lean in the virtual production side is you have your art director you have your design director you have everybody in the the kind of stage making all of those calls live and as fast as they can and then that can even be in a rough form and a gray app forum but then you kind of have some processes that come behind it and make it look pretty but at the end of the day it is that as like though the the directors making the decisions what game they want to make if that's an indie and that's you're the sole developer is the director or if it's in a big company and you have multiple art directors right but at the

end of the day it's how do you get those visions accomplished [Music] well virtual production is definitely as a environment has been a very exciting alluring space you know just like just give anyone a chance to work on those marvel films like yeah i'll be on set moving rocks around i'll be cool with that but uh i would love to kind of hear you dive more into the challenges that they have with proceduralism on the movie set right versus the game production what's the major differences here and the problems that they're dealing with with an art director hovering on both sides is it similar or is it just a little bit different in movie terms i don't know if they've gotten to the point where they have a lot of the proceduralism working live i think the dream is that you have a procedural staircase and if the director says i want it to be a little bit wider or a little bit taller that asset is live in the game at runtime um so that's a giant

hard problem to crack right because games are not designed or game engines are designed to run lean and mean and not kind of dynamically change topology of things so we had a joke that like the unreal static mesh is called a static mesh for a reason because it's static it's not designed to be procedural and move around and kind of update update itself while you're playing the game and they're they're making lots of strides and they have like procedural components and things now but at the end of the day that's the challenge is which honestly a game doesn't really do for the most part it's like how do you have the sat be live and you can make those edits um and that's where you're seeing like unity has some stuff when vr mode and unreal has it too but that's where we're kind of seeing more and more of that to where you're in the game playing the game making those decisions maybe the remote connection comes in to where you have an environment artist an effects artist an animator all kind of live linked into the main hub session um which really doesn't apply as much to a game developer um

it's not like you're in a play test and someone's like oh that door is too big let's kind of make it whiter usually you write that down and then it takes three days to kind of come back and and have another play test with that star fixed uh but the goal would be you play the game you say okay these are all the problems that we had with it someone can go through and people can fix it immediately you launch the game again all the things are fixed then you're playing it again so i think that's we're still pretty far from it but that's that's what the film people are trying to solve towards like how fast can we get those changes uh updated and eventually i think the game uh industry will have to kind of be on a spot we'll benefit from that yeah it is a tricky thing like how how much do you want to be in this qa testing session and and really want to change it i don't think most artists wants to be there live to kind of fix doors uh yeah but i can definitely it's the hot seat yeah it's like hey just be on

standby we're playtesting right now it's like oh great it's right up chair of bugs for me but uh yeah the film said it does have its unique challenges it is a special feature whatever they develop on that side would definitely fall back on this side and vice versa which is what we've been doing um so that that just what do you think really is the next evolution of proceduralism besides you said ai driven is a cut you know unfortunately game companies don't really share data that would have solved the issues like just keep making games and this thing gets more powerful right but everyone has to build their own library and that takes time um other than that uh you were talking about like being able to proceduralize something and then have manual control within that system and then step back again um [Music] what else do you think is really kind of holding us back from a touch of a button and

being is it just purely being less subjective or what is it exactly that we need to nail here to remove that barrier i think the well all of those are problems so i think the the making the algorithms better so like if that's powering with ai or or however you need to do it to like make the black boxes smarter um art directing it is a giant problem um part of the art directing being a problem is that the tools are still too hard to use right um so i think that kind of i think it's the biggest challenges most artists are still not using those tools um it's still you have the tech artists and maybe they kind of wrap some stuff up so an environment artist can use it and maybe there's one or two more senior or slightly more technical people that are the ones doing and using those tools but it's not one of those that's like a zbrush and even like i think a good analogy is a substance painter to substance designer right now we're still in substance designer land so there's some people that are going to

go and they're going to do it but we need that painter jump to where now everybody can jump in and use it and they'll use the smart masks and they'll use the kind of the fast sliders to kind of get the look that they want but they still have the full control so again to to point at algorithmic or adobe at this point as a success story of proceduralism i think that's the next step is how do you make it easy and maybe the promethean ai is that because it is very much ux driven and very much more friendly and more you type a command and it does it as opposed to be like all right let me load this file from this place and insert it to this other place and here's a bunch of sliders and um and make it a little more complicated so i think lowering the bar of entry so it's any artist can jump in and be like yeah i want to make a forest cool here's how you make a forest this next episode is a fun one uh and it's with daniel bisted so but daniel ballystead is a senior character artist over at embark studios so embark studios

is something that you've probably been hearing a lot in recent years especially since they just announced their their project it's made up of a lot of x dice wizards uh from the battlefield series and a lot of attention is towards them because they are a small team and remain to be small at least in the triple a sense and are leveraging their strength in numbers by pushing for tools like what luis has kind of been lecturing about using proceduralism and whatever shortcut and workflows that are efficient to create what used to take 300 people and being achieved with a smaller team and if you've seen their latest project and what they're doing over at embark studios you know you'll be a full-time believer that they are on to something with uh just

rethinking of how to make a game from scratch right so this is from episode 271 simplifying efficient workflows with daniel bysted enjoy yeah i think in general with game artists especially there's a lot of um wasted time in in each stage and i think uh the the amount of versatilia programs kind of um we kind of get lost in that it's like well i'm in zbrush now so i'm going to spend all my time in zbrush doing zbrush things right yeah and then it kind of compartmentalized you know the end product which is you know a model with textures on it right and uh and and there's like an over emphasis of each stage being perfect especially when you're working as an external development team outside the studio there's like little gates put into place of like we want the best quality each stage it's like well no one

really works like that because in the end it's like what's the end product and what's the deadline and how i get there shouldn't matter but yeah i think because of game development and getting so more much more complex with teams being bigger but budgets being bigger that leads naturally think gates are like the best way to be efficient um instead of just you know a little trust in the senior artist of like let me just i'll get there just tell me when the deadline is it's like when do i how can i check you on each stage to make sure that you're going yeah it did it does feel like the last few years it's kind of kind of morphed into that weird um weird thing and i think i caught myself and it's like well i mean i guess they can use this for marketing at some point it's like just a pretty high-risk image but rarely that's the case right uh it's a lot of wasted work and time in those little areas especially yeah i can't imagine for creature and characters so you've been

seeing a huge shift then uh for for that department especially um that like these programs are kind of disabling those bad habits of over over sculpting and doing these things right yeah i think um especially uh repetitive work um a very i mean there's there's a handful of sculpting softwares out there right yeah and and most of them are [Music] um i mean really good when it comes to sculpting you can you know go high poly and do uh great sculpting work there but um the interesting thing in blender is that you can use all the other parts as well yeah you can use you know cloth simulation and um things like that adding hair um which is procedural and not like oh

every vertex is a thing that you have to move with your brush yeah um and also you have uh instances so i've i've been experimenting with you know just so for instance uh if you are creating a lizard godzilla for instance what you would do in a traditional sculpting software is uh you would sculpt all of these you know little plates on its back right that's a lot of plates yeah but in blender you could basically creates just three plates or so and then you just do a so-so job with each of them and then then you just instance those across the back and then you go back and and like hand sculpt it better and all and all those instances

uh will be updated and and then you can replace them or you know add more geometry to them or change them to uh something else entirely yeah i definitely agree with you there like there's um you know i'm an environment guy so with environment you never really need to sculpt really anything right unless you really want to but like when you're in a zbrush program you know it doesn't have the advantages of the instances and all these procedural things that are more computer generated than than artists uh instructions right so uh there's always seems to be like a handicap if i fully dedicate my time on that side and coming back i mean i mean the bridging and all that stuff i've always tried to help with that with gozi stuff but like those little times that you switch back

and forth it just builds up uh yeah as ceremonies it gets tiring uh switching program to program and it kind of kills the flow it's kind of like what you're you're kind of talking about that flow is so important i mean especially if you're i mean if you're picking up an asset that you worked on a week ago yeah i don't think you have to yeah exactly and then it's like oh i have to open this file and then this file and then this file and it's like did did i have the save version updated with the maya version right right i think so and then you have to uh yeah yeah it's a lot of file management for sure that i have a bad habit of like making it quick and saving onto my my desktop right but like my desktop just gets filled with like all these stupid files eventually and it just becomes a mess and i hate that and uh yeah it's just a bad it's a bad way of doing things i i do like the fact that

it seems like the movement now is not about having all the programs for every specialized thing it's more about what's the one program that can do it all because um and for for good reason because a lot of these programs don't survive like the very specialized program right it's like ah this is not going to make it it's not enough it's like completely dedicated to uv like rhythm right i was like oh rhythm seems to be fun make it easier but like it's just for uv this is not going to survive uv's not that hot for people to kind of invest you know learning a program for and and stuff and it's always that danger right the danger of like well should i really bet on this and learn this program and hope that it's around five ten years from now right like i've kind of abandoned so many softwares in the past that kind of have ptsd from learning new things right yeah so but it's but it's also exciting to learn new things right it is but i'm like at a

point where i rather have reliable software um then then keep learning these specialized software that don't survive because i have so many like a graveyard of softwares that just aren't around anymore just not enough support right because business is real right so um so yeah he's buying them all i know right uh i kind of want to ask you about this because you know being a creature and character artist um you know you're finding efficiencies in your workflow um you know meta human just came out right and that's something that seems to be like the mega scans for character i dived into a bit but i would love to kind of hear your perspective being that's your discipline and your thoughts on it yeah i mean it's it's um yeah it's one of those things it's very similar to when um 3d scanning started happening with

characters you know with with heads so you had a there was a bunch of uh you know tutorial maker people who was into sculpting uh a couple years back was like everything you need to know is anatomy you need to focus on anatomy and that's right right now it's like well you don't sculpt people you just bring in the scan kind of right right and um at least in a lot of the um for a lot of the character assets um but then you have sure you have some hero character assets that you will you know sculpt and and have a you know create a proper character and you know you have a art director that has a certain vision for the character um but yeah there's a lot of you know opportunities for people who just want to sculpt faces

that has gone out the window for sure oh yeah and and that's that's why i think it's important not to just put all your eggs in one basket i think it's it's good to have a really good to have a specialty and try to but also try to you know uh look at what what is tangenting to my specialty what what else can i learn uh because there it's also a huge danger in trying to learn everything i'm i'm kind of stupid enough to try to do that but it's very challenging you know try to um a lot of my personal projects i do you know i do everything like yeah lighting and rigging and you know characters and uh and it's very time consuming and challenging and and i fake a lot of the stuff uh you know

as well just get things done but um yeah to answer your question i think yeah i think another human will eat up a lot of the opportunities but but there's also all of the other stuff uh like outfits and things like that for characters which we can still create so yeah well i mean like that seems to be not being a character art it seems to be the shift because bass bass models are usually provided you guys don't really uh do things from scratch anymore uh no not right um and you did bring an interesting point it seems like you guys got hit twice uh with the so this is your second second uh readjustment uh because you know you know animation had had like the mocap scare right it's like do we have and of course that was adjustment we're just gonna fix up okay yeah and then uh yeah remember you mentioned

that before yeah but it's it's like the jobs don't go away anyway because there was there's more animators more than ever now exactly adjustments yeah mega scans we we just got hit right people scanning everywhere in the last five years photogrammetry just just kind of blew up like a lot of what you guys did you know over ea and stuff uh and then dice you know uh kind of opening up that door and uh there's definitely an adjustment it's like i don't know any environment guys sculpting rocks anymore i mean that used to be a thing the bombardment of rock tutorials like this is how you really make sure that the rocks look good i'll just take a picture no one wants to do that anymore um but i think it's good because this is what i was talking before it's like artists are more um needing to lean towards either the idea man or the technical guy

because the these tools are becoming so available now where uh there's better use of your time to kind of learn how to talk to these tools rather than um you know learning anatomy now i mean it doesn't seem like it sounds like great background knowledge you know obviously there's a a strong foundation of an artist no inadequates like to absolutely have it as a character artist it doesn't seem to be too much of a case anymore we're trying to ship something you know um have that changed greatly or is it more like my blank observation of of what you guys do sorry i i missed the question so like uh a huge shift from [Music] i think when i was beginning like 10 12 years ago anatomy was like an absolute necessity if you want to be a character artist don't don't you have to perfect it right uh

to even think about being a character artist right but now it feels like so many tools are available and the way the company structure is when it comes to creating characters there's a lot of reuse more like frankensteining and kit bashing sorta right and then outfits becomes like more of the the highlight of a character more so than the what's beneath because you really unless it's conan or or someone that [Music] bear chesting it uh anatomy gets really seen um on a surface level yeah um as an artist i still think foundation is king yeah yeah i mean learning uh anatomy and stuff like that is important if you want to create you know your personal art and stuff like that but in i think in in production there there is a lot of reuse and

you use a lot of scan data for humans definitely um so it also i mean it's not all bad it opens up the door for uh more junior people to come in and and do character art like start with off with you know i'm doing a bag for this character or things like that you can sort of split up a character and and help out um being multiple artists um [Music] on one character if there's a shortage of time um but of course everyone all all artists wants to you know own their character and do as much as possible of it by themselves i think um [Music] but yeah uh i think

anatomy skills are not not useless not it's not useless but it's it's not as important anymore because there's so much more uh usage of scans but now uh there's yeah there's more shift towards um stylized hair yeah and and definitely doing stylized characters that's even more interesting now because then you get to create something that didn't exist from the start right right so last but not least uh this is my personal favorites uh from a longtime guest that has been on a few times this is with scott knapp so scott nav had had an illustrious career jump between movies and games

working on the batman vs superman and a bunch of marvel movies like the avengers and he's a lighting artist that also serves his time uh when he's not working on badass movies uh working on badass games and uh lighting as a whole has been in hot demand in recent years and he was able to kind of share his experience uh about the beginning of his career but also uh how in recent years he's been able to use what he's been learning from the ground up in games and uh effortlessly being able to jump around still utilizing the same tools and skills that he's been gathering uh throughout his career so this is from actually gtx and it's a talk that he gave [Music]

in episode 269 flowing between worlds lighting and games and films with scott knapp enjoy the idea of not having to bake light maps and stuff is super exciting having uh real-time global illumination and uh sharp shadows on you know million billion i think they have a couple billion polygons in their scene is like insane dude so it's stuff that we've like these constraints uh just being lifted and with that uh time too like not having to bake not gonna wait around for stuff being able to completely light in real time and see exactly what your image is gonna look like is a huge time saver like uh there'll be times where i'm at work and i don't really know what something's gonna look like until i do a production bake so a lot of times i'll do my production bakes before i go to sleep at night and i wake up the next morning and see how it was but you can imagine like that iteration is super slow and even with like preview

quality bakes for a lot of our environments it takes like 15 minutes uh to really see what it's going to look like even at a previous preview level so uh being able to light in real time with it looking that good with like that kind of bounce light and stuff is crazy exciting uh because it's just gonna make things look way better artists are gonna be able to craft things way faster i was gonna be able to get art directed way better because you'll be able to have people tweak things uh next to each other in real time and really like block out what a scene is going to look like so i'm stoked man this is a question from uh burn how hard or is easy was the transition from games to film stressful the change between the two industries with deadlines etc um there's a little bit of stress like it's you know i think you get a little bit of um imposter syndrome right a lot of times when you're starting something new so you're like oh dude i don't belong here these people are freaking pros you know me bro but you pick things up quickly

learn from me guys step back no i'm kidding but yeah dude like it's it's uh it can be nerve-wracking a little bit but just get out of your own head and just be dependable and don't be afraid to ask questions like even if it makes you look like a noob that's okay because you will be a noob like when you're when you're transitioning you're you know you're just learning a lot of this stuff um try to do as much research as you can and learn stuff before you get that job but you know it's okay to ask questions and even if it makes you look a little dumb at least you won't mess something up because messing something up makes you look way worse so if you render something badly or you have the wrong settings or you're not doing things properly within the pipeline it's gonna be way worse than just asking a dumb question so um i think as long as you know you're willing to to really dig in and learn uh you're gonna learn something new at every studio you go to too like even working within film i've used probably like four or five different renders and tools

uh because each studio has their own pipeline so they're not expecting you to know everything about their pipeline because you haven't worked there yet so it's it's okay to have that little bit of growth a lot of times they'll have learning programs like when i was at digital domain they have really really good proprietary stuff for maya that helps lighting just like way you know manage things way better than maya out of the box so if you can light uh you know using maya's default stuff you can definitely like using a studio's proprietary tools because they're making things better and cleaner for artists to come through and stuff great uh so this is a question what are your recommended resources for upcoming lighting artists to learn from and uh let's answer that one for us he has two questions dude i uh for me it was a lot of a lot of tutorials like in school i didn't have a lot of teachers that that were super familiar with lighting a lot of them were animators or or a layout

artist or something so yeah like i just went deep on tutorials nomen usually has pretty decent ones some of them are dated at this point but a lot of the the theory and stuff is still really really relevant um tutorials that i fell in love with early on that probably still hold up today uh jeremy vickery is he's a really really good lighting artist from pixar he put out some gnomon dvds like way back in the day um and that dude's like a double threat he's able to to do concept painting and uh you know digital lighting so he's he's just a stud and he's also moved back and forth between film and games like he worked at pixar for a long time and i think he was a naughty dog ubisoft and stuff so um yeah i would say learn from from tutorials uh there's documentation you know i would say be a little bit wary of of uh youtube tutorials because sometimes with some bad information but also reach out to people you know um

i've done mentorships with people in the past like official mentorships so you know that's something that i might consider in the future so i could be a resource to help people learn um yeah reach out to people uh all i can say is dude leave me alone like try not to pester people you don't want to be like uh you don't want to be bugging people about stuff but a lot of times uh people know what it's like to start out so they're willing to kind of give back and help people learn and stuff yeah i think this is definitely a relative um there's a cool way the social distance before social distancing was cool right and at conventions of anything it's um it's a lot more intimidating to walk up to professionals and you have all these weird uh quirks right that you have to work over but online i think there's a way to kind of compose your message and and and and time it correctly and and come across a little bit safer

uh but yeah but you know the other side of that is it's so it feels so approachable that people go overdo it right um and if anything i i always uh related to how people should sell things right you're selling somebody you're selling yourself essentially to somebody for a possible mentorship for advice um there has to be an exchange in value somehow right there has to be yeah the more that you can create that benefit for the person you're asking something from and and and giving them uh some value in return uh the better the exchange um the the more invested they will be to kind of help you so you got to figure that out uh yeah because you're you're paying for someone's time at that point right and people get off work they have families and stuff so you know answering a bunch of questions might not necessarily be what they want to do at that moment but like you're saying like if there is like a some kind of more formal thing like i know

cgma has really really good mentorships and programs so there's stuff where you just you know instead of going to school you might be able to just do something like that and you know it's a little bit of money but it's worth it uh for things like that so uh this is a question from roberto uh would it be better to have animated models instead of static when doing lighting uh what is the difference um i think so yeah i think having some kind of dynamic uh movement is important when showing off your lighting just because uh you're able to see how shadows and reflections are playing off a surface seeing the spec highlights and stuff and how they roll off a surface is really important so if there's no movement it's hard to see a lot of that stuff so screenshots are good but having like a subtle camera move like a pen or a tilt just something to show it off if you can have animation that's even better as long as it's good animation

if you have like really dodgy animation uh it's just gonna make your whole piece look like [ __ ] so i'd recommend uh working with someone who's actually an animator making sure it's good otherwise just keep ecstatic and move your camera this is a question from burn again do you see yourself staying in the game industry now or still jumping from games to films uh for now i'm really liking video games like it's it's uh it's a little bit more slow paced i guess uh the the deadlines aren't as tight uh at least at turtle rock the overtime has not been an issue at all um when i was working at other studios in television and visual effects i've done 19 20 hour days like two days three days a week uh sometimes and that's not super typical but it's not uncommon either um you know it's a lot of times especially when things are getting tight with film you can expect to be doing like 10 12 hour days pretty regularly and i'm sure

some game studios are the same way but at least at turtle rock it's it's been sick and like we've really been trying to manage scope and and do things to make it so people aren't working crazy hours all right guys so that concludes part two of five series of the best of 2021. i hope you guys enjoy and learned as much as i did talking to these amazing guests this past year i feel very fortunate that they were able to spend one hour of their day uh to talk with me and share the knowledge uh because they are the pioneers uh of what's happening out there uh in the game industry and and forging basically what we're seeing already in 2022 so um again proceduralism and things basically and uh making things easier through whatever shortcuts we can find is the name of the game and the theme for the next five ten

years so uh if you guys are liking the portions of the episode that was shared you know go back and listen to the full episode because there's all types of nuggets uh from that treasure chest so until tomorrow i'll see you guys again [Music] [Music] thank you for listening to today's episode if you are liking the podcast go to the apple itunes store and give gamedev unchain a five-star rating this will help spread the joy and love and exposure for the podcast and we thank you very much if you want to continue the conversation go to our discord which

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