Stumbling Toward 'Awesomeness'

CRYENGINE CINEBOX

I am giving a talk at SIGGRAPH 2012 entitled ‘Film/Game Convergence: What’s Taking So Long?‘ where I discuss the inherent differences between games and film and go over a few case studies of projects that attempted to use a game engine for film previs. I also talk a bit about the development of our CINEBOX application, the decisions we had to make, and how we dealt with many of the issues previous attempts have run into.

STUDIO WORKSHOPS

I will be giving two more Studio Workshops this year, the first is a followup to last year’s Introduction to Python, entitled ‘Python Scripting in Maya‘. The other workshop is ‘Building a Game Level‘, which is the same basic workshop I gave last year where I show people how to make a playable game level in CryEngine in an hour. Studio Workshops are hands-on sessions where each attendee has a computer and follows along with the instructor. It’s a great chance for people of all ages to learn new things.

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I have been really busy on Ryse, this past weekend I found some time to wrap the XNA import methods I had written in a UI.  I will post it soon in an un-padded form for the people asking for it.

For those who don’t know what I am referring to, a while back I wrote some python to import XNA character files (from retail discs) into Maya as textured characters with original joint names, skinning, etc. I hit some snags on the UV, texturing, and then viewport 2.0 stuff. It’s really great to see topology, bind pose, weighting, joint layout, etc.. of your favorite characters. Great reference!

I would also like to make a post about viewport 2.0 in the next week or so, that whole system is such a complete piece of frustrating garbage, hopefully you can benefit from my aimless bumping into walls in the darkness.  Anyway, gotta start ramping up for SIGGRAPH, so that might have to wait.