The VFX Divide

When I worked a college summer job in a factory making paint, half the workers were hired by the factory the other half by Manpower. The factory workers made more than double the manpower employees even tho you couldn’t tell them apart for work produced/position. This kept the lower wage workers from revolting b/c they couldn’t create a consensus among all workers to present their case/improve their situation. This divide was crafted perfectly to get the factory to work at 75% the cost it used to.
VFX is similar. There are many voices by people in difficult situations trying to bring people together. At the same time there are a large group of well paid, relatively normal hours (for much of the year) artists who have it good and aren't going to lift a pen to change anything. In the factory it was a purposeful, prefabricated situation, in vfx its not but the same dichotomy exists.
VES 2.0 is/was our best hope. The unions, for whatever reason, haven’t got a foothold.
I don’t know another way to rectify the situation, until it gets worse for more artist. As long as the comfort level is palpable for the majority of artists, its going to be an uphill battle for change...  not unlike the peak oil, global warming, I guess that’s humanity in 201X.

lots of updates

Been hard at work on our game, lots of ships and assets built, check them out at http://galacticrogue.com/?page_id=401
not much more work and all the ships will be blocked in, then generic textured so the game will have everything except final textures. Then I'll go back over everything UV'ing and textureing.

Where the F Have I been?

Sheesh, let me go back to where I left you. I start scripting and coding. Its going slowly but moving forward. As I go I fix almost every bug with the help of Unreal Developers at work, and they are things were I'm like WTF?!?! I keep going back trying to solve them myself but the devs here fix them in under 10 minutes, while I stare at code and try things for hours. One of the developers is working on an XNA game that looks like complete garbage, b/c he only cared about the code and game mechanics. he's particularly talented in what he does, solves many of my issues. We come up with a game idea to work on together, but first he need to finish his 3 years of work already invested game. I decide if I want a team-mate I need to, in this case, help him first finish his game and we can re-work and reuse the assets in the next game that will be in Unreal.
So where does that leave us? Well I've been making space ships, lots of them. But that's not very easy when you have to redesign, UV, and texture them. I had to re-learn a hard surface texturing workflow and practice a bunch of things (doing it wrong many times) before I got it right. So now I'm like a hand full of ships down, with 2 more hand fulls to go. Whats the game you ask? The Dev blog for that game can be found here: http://galacticrogue.com/ a lot of the art, like the characters, will not be redone, and will look as good as it does, the ships and planets are the things I'm working on. Also Andrew is art directing the game b/c in the end this is his game, more than it is ours. I feel like the style we're going for is a 60% good lookingness (up from 10%). Basically crank this shit out and move on to what I really want to do, but make them good enough to re-work/re-use later. While I can write HLSL I don't care enough to do that to make this game even better. Its going to be good enough ...then back to Unreal.
I'm not in love with this idea, me working on this project, but I think its smart enough to see what working with Andrew is like, and its only logical to get someone of talent on the same page/team. He's a great developer, works a lot on his own projects after hours. I know lots of talented guys but many have long since burned themselves out working on their own projects. I think small teams are the only way to make a living as an indie developer. Each person is so key that you're really investing in each other if you choose to work with someone.  So I'm learning a lot about better more efficient content creation methods, only making me better more ready for the future projects.
Make ship, neeext, make ship neeeext...

Area Tutorial Series Part 1

Did a tutorial series for the AREA this is part 1 or parte uno if you're Spanish!
http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/fx_shot_process_with_david_schoneveld_part_1

Scriptin' Update

So what's been going on? Well hey thanks for asking! I've got the main classes put together and plugged in with some of my content. I'm mainly working on the PollockPawn, PlayerController, GameType classes. I also have AIController, EnemyPawn, and I think another but I'm forgetting as I write this. Anyway. I also have a LOT of work to get the enemies ready even to put into Unreal. They need to be re-UV'ed and Textured, bound (they're rigged) and animated. Joy, so there's that. But as Far as PollockPawn goes I think he's just about ready. I mean its more flipping a few switches than it is writing any code. Yet, despite the simplicity of some of it, I'm still moving forward slowly. I'm trying to read through some classes, and re-read them again trying to get a sense of things and where things will be when I need them later. There's so much a LOT of sound controls, which I'll have to come back to. Anyway, its not working in game yet, actually I don't know exactly what it will look like when it is working in game. I've found that most tutorials that use Unreal Script don't really know what they're doing (I've seen a lot). If anyone knows of a really good one, I'm all ears. So I'm paving my way forward, steady and slowly.

Current PC Build Recommendation

My friend was building a computer so we went through a bunch of components to figure out what he should make. Here is the current list of what I think makes a great mid priced PC ($1600ish). Its not far from my current PC newer CPU, GPU and more power.

CPU: Intel Core i7-2700K Sandy Bridge 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) 

Motherboard: ASUS P8Z68-V

Memory: CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB

Graphics: EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD

OS/Software Drive: Intel 510 Series 120GB SATA III

Data drives (buy 1 or 2): Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB

Power Supply: PC Power and Cooling Silencer 910W

DVD/blue ray cheapest one, whatever you need drive

Case... its kinda up to you on how you want it to look. This is the case I have, cheap and works fine.
Antec Three Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower

Unreal Scriptin'

Well not really. I started doing a tutorial for bot AI and I felt like I needed a bigger refresher on Unreal Script so I started watching the Eat3D Unreal Script videos again. I feel like I missed a lot the first time and am getting a lot more information this time than I thought I would. its good. I also made a playlist of SMU's Unreal Script youtube video's here. There are more tutorial videos these are just the ones I want to watch or re-watch, as I've seen a few already. Anyway going well, I'm going to push forward on the tutorials even if I don't know everything I'm doing, just to keep momentum.