Rob Berry invited one of his old work colleagues to give us a lecture on the every day work methods and mentality of a Vehicle artist working on All Point Bulletin, a popular free to play MMO.
I found this to be a great experience as the presentations introduced new modelling techniques that i'm currently still trying to re-create in Maya 2016 but I believe ive managed to re-create his methodology to allow myself to create normally awkward shapes such as car bonnets and curved exteriors without having to move individual vertexes.
Alongside this, i was shown Uv'ing examples and given breakdowns on how to solve modelling and baking issues from my prior work. Even a breakdown of every step required to incorporate believable damage models. This knowledge was invaluable but lets get back on to the PPD part.
We were thankfully given a very blunt breakdown of the industry, how valuable our portfolio is in comparison to the final diploma and how much you should take from your possible employer before drawing a line in the sand. For example, many employers may set possible candidates upwards of a month product to "prove" themselves only to never receive employment. Of course this will only be a rare possibility but we should be fully aware of when it transitions to the stage of preventing us from seeking further employment possibilities.
We were even provided with a breakdown of the APB's employment criteria and methods. All in all it was incredibly insightful, providing us with a great deal of information on subjects we may have never even considered previously.
I talk to Danny about almost all areas of the industry and after receiving advice on almost every area i could hope for he showed me multiple examples of similar vehicles to mine from APB as well as some of his personal modelling projects, making me feel much more comfortable with my modelling direction, putting functionality and attention to detail above all else if time permits it.
As a final point, I managed to add him on LinkedIn which in turn opened me up to over 200 new contacts. I really hope more industry talks are brought up before the end of third year as they are not only incredibly insightful, they provide a much needed push that i believe a lot of us could greatly benefit from.
No comments:
Post a Comment