On Wednesday myself and Mike Pan attended the January Full Indie event where game developers were sharing projects they created during last weeks global Game Jam. It was a fun time where we had a chance to sample games and give critique to there creators. Afterwards we had time to discuss planing for the future of the Blender User Group in Vancouver.
Saturday was the Spark job fair where a number of people came to speak with local and not so local studios. It was enjoyable to be there and some of them even had branded trinkets to give away, thanks to Zoic and Double Negative I don’t have to search for the house key every morning. One of the representatives there was even reviewing demo reel’s, thank you very much sir. To top it off I even met one of my friends who was a volunteer for the event, Shane who recently got a job as a Rotomation artist at Gener8. Shane is my self declared rival and arch nemesis 🙂
There were a lot of great prospects there for environment artists and surprisingly Python scripting. Surprising in that it almost seemed as though they were more interested in Python than actual art. Suppose its good since I like Python but a bit concerning. Art is what I aim for. Environments done right are amazing to behold. Even in stillness environments tell an animated story. Code on the other hand leaves crowds of people confused or otherwise puzzled. That’s my experience sharing code projects with other people anyway.
With that being said I need to expand a little bit more on the demo than originally thought. I was going to just do environments and keep some other related side projects to myself but the demand for code has prompted me to share some Python I’m working on. Last week a node editor was mentioned and details of it are still closed but I am going to share the Git repo URL here as its being worked on anyway so that studios can sample it. The last few days a fair bit of time was put into it. I will be working on art stuff and finding a job most of this week but there will be some more commits in the next five days.
Speaking of expanding the demo the next scene concept will be mainly architecture and machines. At Spark just about every studio was working on projects involving Urban environments plus I have a thing for architecture, love the stuff. It will be great contrast with the nature scene currently in the reel. Likely some of the weaker shots will be pulled out to be replaced with the hard edge stuff once there is content ready for it.
The Environment Guy 