I can’t remember how I found out about this book - I’m sure it was recommended to me. Anyway, I’ve had this book for 4 or 5 years now (first edition), and it is easily my most borrowed book at work. Jeremy Birn is currently a Lighting Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios, (he’s worked on Cars and The Incredibles), so you can be assured he knows his stuff.
The book itself is non-application specific, but deals with light theory (did you know that red things appear closer than blue things, so you can add artificial depth to a scene just by the choice of your lighting colours?), and it’s worth the money if you simply want to learn how to use a simple 3 point light setup for your portfolio.
Anyway, the book is now in its second edition, with a massive amount of new content, so there really is no excuse for me not buying it.
“Digital Lighting and Rendering” (Jeremy Birn)
Technorati Tags: game industry, lighting, Jeremy Birn, rendering
Asked of me on Game-artists forums a few weeks ago (it seems to have gone kaput).
How long does it take to build and texture a model? 1 Week? 1 month?
Some models take a long time, some don’t. Some come together quickly, and others are a struggle to get right.
The time taken depends on the models importance in the game, and I don’t think I have ever worked on a game where you sat down, built and textured a model in a few days and had it be final. Most of the time your model will have to be altered (for artistic, animation or technial reasons), and in almost all cases you’ll need to have the assets approved, often by several people. You always revisit to adjust and polish geometry (often for deformation), texture maps, shader values, rigging, skinning.
I could build a game ready 5k model then unwrap it, texture it with diffuse, specular and normal maps, then rig its body and face in a week. If I was building it by reusing and changing a head from one model, a torso from another, legs from another I could probably construct two a week. These would be good enough to go into a game, but would still require more work - but spending a month on a model isn’t necessarily the best option. Spending 4 weeks on it would be a better use of time.
But 4 weeks and a month are the same thing, are they not?
Spending a month on one asset is quite boring. How about spending a block of 2 weeks on it, then another week a few months later adjusting it, then a few months later going back for a week of polishing? That’s a much more likely scenario - and in my opinion it’s also a more effective method that a solid 30 days non-stop.
Technorati Tags: game industry, how long does it take to build a model?
SKU - Stock Keeping Unit
I few years ago when working at another company, we got emails from management telling us how well we were doing - “And we will be releasing XXX on 4 SKUs”. I had no idea what a SKU was, I asked, and was told it was Stock Keeping Unit. Right, but what does that really mean?
It’s basically a barcode - something that makes it easy for shops to track different versions of the same product.
SKU - Games: game, per platform, per packaging.
If you were to release a game on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, that would be 2 SKUs. If you were to release it on the PC as a standard
edition and a deluxe edition, that would be 2 SKUs. It’s the same product (more or less), but just gets tracked differently.
Now, I’m also assuming that region releases get their own SKUs too, so an NTSC and a PAL release count as 2 SKUs, but I can’t confirm that. However it works, I’ll still be buying Skate next week.