What is Tech Art?

Here are presentation videos from the talk given at 3D Stimulus Day.

The panel was hosted by Chad Moore, who you can follow on twitter as @smapdi

He also has a great blog with a load of information about how to get a job as well as including slides to his talks which you can find here.

The rest of the panel was made up of the following people -

Ryan Griffin, Senior Character TD, Turbine - @griffinanimator
Elliott Mitchell, Vermont Digital Arts - @Mrt3D
Brandon Bateman, Senior Tech Artist, Turbine
Farley Chery, Instructor, ITT Institute and Bunker Hill Community College
Justin Woodard, Technical Artist, Turbine - @JustinWoodard

The presentation covers what a technical artist means, covering how the varied role differs between the size and direction of the company from a large corporation to a small indie developer.

Roughly 45 mins in total over 3 parts, the final part includes part of the Q&A session.

Part 1 -

Part 2 -

Part 3 -

Using Unity3D to create a 2D game

Presentation given by Alex Schwartz and Yilmaz Kiymaz of Owlchemy Labs.

The topic of making a 2D game by mixing 2D and 3D in Unity and some of their tools that were created and techniques that can easily be used.

Some of these tools are available on their website for free.

The presentation is in three parts, totalling around 45 minutes.

Part 1-3:

Part 2-3:

Part 3-3 including the QA session:

Stuff from 3D Stimulus

So this is really a highlight of some of the info as there are videos of some of the talks to come later.

Okay, so most probably couldn't care, but asking to help folks at the local New England resellers out, they're looking to get 200 people signed up for the 20th April event. GET.

If they do, they'll get some money to put towards local events, and they've helped put on a lot of cool events for artists in the Boston area, so if you're in the area or just want to help out, register through them and it'll be much appreciated.

The webinar is mostly a bunch of presentations about vfx, one is from the effects on Black Swan and another movie and one is a game I think.

If anyone is interested, give Heidi a shout - hjelev@greateasterntech.com

She needs your name, email and either an address or your company name and she'll automatically opt you out of receiving any Autodesk newsletter spam, unless you actually want it.

Other bits and pieces, Motion Builder or the Entertainment Suite of products, if you buy through GET, you'll get a free Kinect and set up with hacked software to have your own motion capture device out of it.

www.brekel.com if you want to check out the software that was demo'ed as a mocap software that plugged right into Motion Builder.

A nice free shader for people to use in their work was 3Point Shader Lite found here.

3D Stimulus Day

GET are hosting another 3D Stimulus Day event - 9th April

A recap about the event, which is an awesome free art and networking event -

Location: Mt. Ida, Newton, MA

Time: 9:00am - 5:00pm

Presentations this year include:

• Chad Moore of Turbine and Rigging Dojo, with Job Hunting Tips for 3D Artists
• Alex Schwartz and Yilmaz Kiymaz of Owlchemy Labs, presenting Mixing 2D and 3D in Unity
• A panel-discussion with various tech artists from local game companies, mediated by Chad Moore
  • Ryan Griffin, Senior Character TD, Turbine
  • Elliott Mitchell, Vermont Digital Arts
  • Brandon Bateman, Senior Tech Artist, Turbine
  • Farley Chery, Instructor, ITT Institute and Bunker Hill Community College
  • Justin Woodard, Technical Artist, Turbine
• Willem Van Der Schyf, Tencent Boston, presenting his Workflow for Character Creation using Max & ZBrush
• Afternoon networking session upstairs with demos from local individuals and companies including Brass Monkey, Vermont Digital Arts, Owlchemy Labs, 3d Camera Technology, Mocap with Kinect and Motion Builder and lots more!!!

Adding to this, The Boston Post Mortem are having a meet up on the 13th April and will be talking about Game Law Hot Topics.

This should be a great, interesting meet up too.

Salary Survey?

Adam Martin has a survey up to find game and web dev salaries.

Worth filling it in - Survey here.

The results of the survey will eventually be shown here in about a weeks time or so.

Conventions

For anyone that has been to conventions or to future ones such as PAX East, Conventionist might be a really handy app to have!

It has the event agenda's, maps of the floors and helps you schedule out your meetings.

While talking about conventions, especially with the recent GCE11, the nice folks over at DICE have shared their presentations which have loads of great information about what they did with Battlefield, which you can find here.

BUG - Multiplayer 3D Worlds

The last Boston Unity Group - BUG, meet up happened on the 15th of February. This talk was about 3D virtual worlds in Unity, given by Chris Hart, at Reaction Grid. You can follow her on twitter as @dstrawberrygirl

A good over view of the event was written up by the Lion Rampart here.