Git

Spark job fair, Jan Full Indie, Environments and code.

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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.

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Drawing Blueskys, Blender meetup and Python rambling.

The Environment Guy Blog , , , , , , , ,

Blueskys (thumbnail sized sketches)are one of the things I had a hard time with as a student, so I started drawing thumbnails on Friday using Krita a digital painting/drawing application. Its amazing how a little bit of time can dramatic improve something. Although not particularly good at it, in the first dozen images so far there is a clear progression of quality as images become less 2D and more volumetric. I decided to start doing blueskys because its one of the things the design instructors always told us to do in order to come up with appealing work. I would hope that my environments become a hallmark of appealing original design. Expecting to get a page done (about 100 blueskys) and put it up here by next week.

Along with drawing blueskys I also started an online sketchbook at conceptart.org in order to expand the audience and possibly receive more feedback. I’m looking to over the next year to expand lots in the area of drawn/painted concepts and spread them over various networks.

Apart from drawing I also have some Python and C++ development going on at home. I’m not going to say too much about it at this point other than I am working on a functional prototype for a node based pipeline automation tool. Some things are already working, last couple days I have been stuck on a bug but its sure to be figured out. When the required functionality to be useful is complete I will share the git repo on TheEnvironmentGuy.com (Its open source and under a permissive license :).

Yesterday was the January 2015 meetup for the Blender group in Vancouver. Its got a fair bit larger than it was three months ago. Currently majority of people there are ‘new recruits’ to Blender but there are some industry people there. We were talking about some new development for a GUI aimed at teaching people how to use the system. It hasn’t been formalized yet but I expect to get info passed my way when the funding proposal comes.