jeff-hanna.com Blog

The newly revamped Area went live today. Site navigation is much improved over the 1st generation Area. The Tech Art forum, which was proposed to Autodesk after the excellent TA roundtables at GDC 2007, was added, too.

I was in Shanghai during SIGGRAPH so I didn’t get to go to the awards ceremony. Thank you to everyone who voted for me. I appreciate it. You can see all ten winners for this year’s Master Awards here.

I’ve been nominated for an Autodesk Master award. To quote from the Autodesk site,

“Masters produce work that reshapes and redefines the boundaries of technology, art, and visualization. Mastery for these individuals is but a step along the way because their spirit and imagination drive them to find new ways of doing things. They see the world through a different lens. They are inspired and inspiring.”

I’d appreciate it if you would take a second and go vote for me. The voting page is here.

Here are the compile notes from the three days of roundtables I ran at GDC this year. I’d like to offer my most heartfelt thanks to everyone who attended. You generated some excellent discussions and were very open in sharing your knowledge and ideas with each other. I sincerely hope I have the opportunity to host more TA roundtables for you at future Game Developer Conferences.

You can also download the roundtable notes in Acrobat format here.

What do tech artists do?

• Tools programmers
• Act as an interface or liaison between artists and programmers
• Act as support staff for artists having trouble with in-house or vendor tools
• Triage art asset issues and development system bugs (e.g. the game doesn’t build on my dev kit)
• Design, create, and maintain the art creation pipeline
• Maintain documentation on the art pipeline
• Study artists’ workflows, identify inefficiencies, and create tools to increase productivity
• Work to share technology across projects and/or studios
• Write shaders
• Create R&D artwork to pass through in production pipeline tools
• Validate upgrades to 3^rd party software packages and create migration plans
• Train studio artists on new features found in content creation application upgrades
• Beta test upcoming content creation applications so they can understand the impact of the changes on the studio. They can also provide feedback to the vendor on changes/features that would benefit the studio.

How can a Tech Artist identify inefficiencies in the art pipeline?

• Pair up with an artist to work with them and study their habits
• Have an artist work in your focus studies lab for a few days and study what they do.
• Talk to the artists. Are they satisfied? Do they have any ideas to improve the workflow?

How can someone evangelize the idea of Tech Art within their studio?

• Demonstrate the efficiencies a script or tool will provide the studio
• Show quantifiable metrics. Don’t say, “This would probably save some time”, say “In practice this will reduce the time it takes to perform this task by X%”.
• Work with the producer to schedule time for you to create a demonstration tool
• Be dramatic! If you have X amount of time on your schedule to perform a single instance of a task work within that timeframe to create a tool that will let you finish your task by the end of time X. Then, show the tool and explain how actually doing the task was a small percentage of the time and now that task will no longer take X amount of time to complete.
• Go grassroots. Write scripts to help people other than yourself. Get the artists on your side and they will start evangelizing with you.

Should Technical Artists also create game art?

• Not if they are a full time Technical Artist. Their critical path is one of creating tools. Having them try to work in a dual role is a risk.
• Technical Artists should understand the process of making game art though. Creating R&D artwork in the pipeline to validate the tools can create assets for the programmers to test with is a great way to understand the pipeline.
• Non-critical tasks like special F/X or lighting can, depending on the circumstances, be assigned to Technical Art.

How do you schedule a Technical Artist’s time?

• During preproduction they should be designing and creating the pipeline.
• The pipeline should be complete, and hopefully as close to 100% functional as possible by the time the game is green lighted.
• After that the TA discipline should be scheduled as something akin to a support group. While there will always be a need to create a new one-off tool or to find a way to increase efficiency for the most part the TAs should support the artists. They should ensure the artists are working at their peak.
• Non-pipeline work like shaders, game asset monitoring tools (e.g. something to check the memory use of a game asset), etc… could and should be scheduled during production.

How early should a Technical Artist get involved in the production of a game?

• They should have sign-off privileges on early design work. The TAs will understand the technical issues surrounding the creation of art assets necessary to fit the design.
• They should work with the graphic engine programmers as early as possible to identify features and the tools that might be needed to support those features.
• Even before there are 3d modelers on the team there should be TAs doing prototype and R&D artwork.

The enhanced object and scene shader support in Max 9 makes me want to do a per-pixel lighting game in a viewport. Crazy? Yeah. But then again, people said I was crazy when I started writing MaxJack. the next thing I knew Autodesk reps were emailing me telling me they were using it during their sales demos to show off the power of MaxScript and I’m getting asked by Autodesk to give a talk at GDC.

Yeah, crazy…

On a whim I tried to see if MaxScript in Max 9 would load the XNA framework assemblies. After all, XNA is an extenstion to .NET 2.0 and MaxScript can load .NET 2.0 assemblies. My initial results are mixed. I got the base “Microsoft.Xna.Framework” class to load via MaxScripts dotNet.loadAssembly() call. I couldn’t get any of the other XNA classes like “Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio” or “Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input” to load, though. Shrug. I might be me, as I don’t know a lot about .NET and MaxScript yet. Or, it might just be that it’s not possible. From what I remember I was having the same problems with the .NET 3.0 (aka Avalon) classes when I tried to load those via MaxScript.

Maybe I’ll drop Larry Minton a line.

Anyway, I do have a new game idea. Here’s a hint, “What’s the product of 3 times 3, 9 times”?

 Oh, yeah, I re-enabled the comments. Since my logs show more than a small handful of people viewing this blog since GDC I thought I should let you talk back to me.

It’s going to take me a few days to get everything in order and write up the notes from the three Tech Art roundtables. Please bear with me.

For a roundtable that I thought would attract about 10-12 people it ended up averaging 30-40 people per day with only 3-4 people overlapping between sessions. That means that over the week I met roughly 85-100 peers who are either Technical Artists, act as TAs, or are interested in promoting technical art within their studios. That’s amazing! Thank you all for attending. I hope everyone left with a better understanding of technical art and with at least one or two new friends/colleagues.

Which means T -5 days until I stand in front of a room of Technical Directors and explain to them why MaxScript is The One True Way to toolset enlightenment. The talk is at 2:30pm on Wednesday.

Maybe I should finish my presentation soon…

On a slightly related note, I was invited to participate in a charity Texas Hold ‘Em poker tournament on Tuesday evening before GDC starts. It benefits the Starbright Children’s Foundation. Autodesk was nice enough to pick up the charitable donation buy-in for me. Hopefully the other 119 game developers who will be competing will bring their A game. I’m looking forward to a fun evening of poker.

Update: I was incorrect about this. If you pass a string to a mapped function it passes the entire string, not each character individually. I don’t know what made me thing it worked. I wish it did, though…

I just discovered that you can send a string to a mapped function in MaxScript. The mapped function treats the string as an array and very quickly processes each character in the string through the function. It’s great for quickly finding and changing characters in a string.

As part of my upcoming GDC talk I’m going to be talking about premier tools that have been written inside of Max. Along with the tools being developed at my employer I want to feature tools created by other Max tool developers. Early this week I wrote Andy of Lots Of Robots fame, Kees at Lumonix, and OrionFlame creator, Light. I’ve never spoken to Andy before, I’ve participated in online discussions with both Kees and Light and I’ve met Kees once, for about twenty minutes, at last year’s GDC.

Within minutes of sending out my emails I received responses from all three. They all offered support and access to their tools. For that I just want to say, “Thank you”. Please consider visiting the websites of these guys and purchasing their tools if they would benefit your pipeline.

Automatron Character Animation System

Lumonix Tools

OrionFlame

As soon as I get around to adding a Links section over on the right-side nav bar on this page I will be adding permanent links to those sites. The tools are amazing and deserve to be promoted heavily.

I’ve gotten this question a lot lately at work. We recently migrated to Max 9 and the artists are still getting used to the new features. The old standby Polygon Counter utility has been removed from Max 9. In it’s place the often under-utilized viewport statistics display has been reworked to perform better and provide information. To enable the viewport statistics the default key is “7″. When the statistics are visible they, by default, display the scene totals for polygon count, vertex count, and frames-per-second.

Obviously the default readout isn’t completely useful to everyone. This was the problem with the pre-Max 9 viewport statistics. The information provided wasn’t entirely useful or configurable. Luckily that has changed in 9. In the Customize\Viewport Configuration dialog there is a new tab, “Statistics”. The controls on that tab allow you to change the information the statistics display provides. You can enable/disable polygon counts, triangle counts, vertex counts, edge counts, and the frames-per-second readout. You can also set the display to show the scene total of those counts, the selection totals, or both the scene and selection totals.

The new system is a huge improvement over the old statistics system and the old Polygon Counter utility. It’s a great update and I’m happy Autodesk chose to update the viewport statistics instead of sticking with the Polygon Counter floating dialog.