Any One With Game Industry Experience?

[Andz]

I might be geting involved in computer games production and would like to get to know a bit of how is a game production company, what are the diferent areas that people work in it.

Any one in the forum has any experience in it? Has any one heard of Houdini in games productions?

I might be also searching on Gamasutra, are there more places I should look at on the net?

Thank you in advance for any help!

[zoki]

Hi

I was for 15 months Art director for a next gen Unreal3 powered game.

If you need to know anything just ask specific questions and I will reply!

For Houdini I think EA in USA was using it, Bandai also and in Europe I think

guerilla games from Amsterdam uses it.

For most people going to games now it might be a surprise how much specs and workflow changed.

A lot of assets are done high poly with Zbrush and then recalculated onto low poly

Normal map calculation and all related to transfering and baking shader and geometry values

is of essential importance

In my experience Houdini is very suitable for games development even if it looks on a first glance that all with games is max related.

I was trying to introduce it in a previous game project but I switched to movies, but I still think that

with clever integration a lot of time and work could be saved and made more flexible

regards

zoran

[Visual Cortex Lab]

I worked for 2 years in game industry back in 2003. I was Cinematics supervisor and pipeline was XSI based... I was also a sort of link between 3D artists and developers (like I was in PheonixTools for camera Tracking software).. I dunno if I can be of any help.. but i'll try to answer your questions if any.

cheers

[Andz]

Ok, I guess the questions I have are pretty basic.

I want to know what are the different areas in a game company:

- art

-- 2d artists

-- 3d artists

-- level designers

- programming

- writers

The other question would be software. I always read about max and softimage for games. I understand the FMVs can be anything that suits you. But character creation and animation, prosps modeling, etc. Max and Softimage are the two word I hear most.

[zoki]

Organization and department differ from company to company

but I guess everybody has these and they are also split:

programing team: -implementation

-feature develpment

-testing

art team:

- concept-preproduction

-modelers

texture artist

animation-rigging

fx

Game design team

layout and level design

testing

prototyping

We used all what was good for given task and what enabled us to integrate new guys asap

we used max, maya, softimage, and of course unreal editor

thats it in short

if you need more dont hesitate to ask

z

[rdg]

maybe this is also of interest for you:

game career guide: Procedural Content Generation

Georg

[Andz]

maybe this is also of interest for you:

game career guide: Procedural Content Generation

Georg

Thank's for the link Georg!

[Allegro]

Houdini was used in Final Fantasy X for a lot of the water effects. I can't say I've heard of it's use in much else.

For an idea of what companies are looking for / how they work check out companies like Epic, and BioWare which have information listed on their site about what they want.

[Andz]

Houdini was used in Final Fantasy X for a lot of the water effects. I can't say I've heard of it's use in much else.

Yeah, I think I read about that too, but if I remember well, it was only used for the FMVs.

[zoki]

it was used for cinematics

not for game content primarily

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com...0&Itemid=68

[brandonY]

i am FX artist at Surreal Software/ company of Midway Games. We use Max, Maya, and Zbrush.. but no houdini. When we look for a FX artist we usually want to see realtime FX in a game engine, but there are exceptions, i think as long as your work is really solid, and are a nice person to get along with then all is good. i know it sounds vague, but we don't have a check list of stuff we go down and say oh he did have this or that.