GDC 2012 – Thursday Recap

THURSDAY The Cameras of Uncharted 3 Used more smaller targeted cameras programmer based using maya, spline, etc then created cam blend system amazing in-game cam spline system fixed cam and debugging features bake cameras down to character had a parenting system that they used to hookup to options and then scripted object cam collision probe/aoe…

GDC 2012 – Wednesday Recap

Another great round of talks today. I spent a good deal of the day in meetings, but attended two fantastic sessions. One was from the company that bought the failed APB game. APB monetization challenges hailand rising APB reloaded fallen earth UGC – assisted publishing reloaded games platform@reloadedinc.com sword of new world freetoplay they own…

GDC 2012 – Tuesday Recap

Key takeaways Hansoft dependency tracking = suck Tuesday-Techart Bootcamp powershell .net modules integrated xaml remove SQL database interaction com interface! for working with excel /photoshop Rob from Bioware pay technical debt automate crash/errors mandatory and thorough code review single point for review/dictator Seth cohesion/collaboration at team lvl guide teach measure trust jason Hayes volition working…

Capturing The Spirit Of Sesame Street

Great article/interview on Gamasutra talking with Nathan Martz and Tim Schafer of Doublefine regarding their new Sesame Street Kinect Game: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6295/capturing_the_spirit_of_sesame_.php

One year ago next month…

Now first let me say that I rarely quote myself, but occasionally I spout something that after reading I’m proud to say I wrote it. Today was one of those occasions. A co-worker had asked me what I think of the recent changes at work. This was my reply. “I am a hopeful optimistic. Life…

Rotation Orders: Euler/Quaternion

Older link, but great explanation of quaternion vs euler and rotation orders. http://www.guerrillacg.org/home/3d-rigging/the-rotation-problem

Blurring the Line: Cutscene vs. Gameplay

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PascalLangdale/20101115/6440/Whats_missing_from_cutscenes.php interesting article discussing interaction of cutscenes and conveyance of emotion.

obtaining maya filenames via two methods

As I continue to learn more about python and maya I’m finding more efficient ways of gathering data. Yesterday during a code review I used the following way to grab the base path from a Maya filename. import maya.cmds as cmds fileName = cmds.file(sceneName=True, q=True) baseFileName = fileName.split(‘/’) del baseFileName[-1] basePath = “/”.join(baseFileName) print basePath…