It’s been a little bit hasn’t it.
I haven’t kept up with this blog as much as I planned when starting at DreamLine. It’s turned out that 2 hours a day on a train isn’t exactly enough time to do everything one would like. Alright, to be fair, that is a somewhat misleading sentiment. I’m sure if I ran my life a little differently, those two hours would be a bit more consistent.
I just like working out too much.
I had a previous draft of this blog, but it was over long and almost a rant on commuting and aspects of life I can be frustrated with. While my commute is frustrating and the physical exhaustion I’ve felt with it lately is getting to me, I decided to rework that article and turn it into something that resembles a constructive, informative, and positive. Negativity begets more negativity and I’d like to avoid that as much as I can. There are plenty of people who’d trade places with me in a heartbeat. I should work on exercising more gratitude.
It’s ok to indulge the urge to share the negative at times, and I definitely do, but I don’t what to be putting that energy out into the ether too often.
Where’s the Art
This is mostly the Low Poly, but the window shutters are the high Poly. The low is almost done, just needs a few more touches and UVs. Maya Hardware 2.0.I’ve made progress, but it’s been slower than anticipated. A lot of what you see was completed in a two week span. With the Substance Pipeline I worked on at DreamLine being ready for testing and our production at a lul, I used my downtime at the office to work on this project and keep up some High Poly to Low Poly workflow practice. I’m at a point in the project where it’s almost time to start baking everything down to the big map I’m going to use in Painter. Sure, some of the smaller props aren’t made yet and the walls and floors need textures for me to continue modeling, but I can tackle all of that when it comes online..
This was scheduled to be wrapped by the end of April. I am fairly sure I will not be able to pull that off. Why? Big things.
Life Events
There are two events happening in the next 40 days that will require a fair amount of my time. The first is my wedding. I’ll be getting married on May 4th to my lovely bride, Kelsey. We’ve been handling the planning on our own. It’s not going to be some sort of crazy $50K wedding (neither of us want to spend that much and we’re simple people when it comes to stuff like this) but even without all the pomp and circumstance of an expensive, over the top gala, it’s still a lot of work!
I must give Jeff, the event coordinator at our venue, a ton of credit. He’s making this as easy as it could be for us.
Even so, there is a lot to button up between now and our date. I don’t think it’ll take up the majority of my train rides, but I’m sure I’ll spend some time and phone data on it.
Event number two is something I can’t really comment on. For the time being, all I can say is that it’s going to require a lot of preparation. I’ve not done anything quite like this before and to make up for that, I need to be very prepared.
This event will absolutely eat up some, if not most of, my train time for the next few weeks.
Once everything is wrapped up, it’ll be time to crank Rain out and then take a long break. I feel burnt already and I want to spend some time relaxing on my rides instead of feeling pressure to produce. I still want to learn Blender 2.8 and do more work but I need to take some time to chill out, play some games, and watch TV.
Other Notes
I’ve been back to writing articles for GameTextures over on Medium. It’s been great to be back at that side hustle and do my best to provide what education I can while doing something I love. My latest article was on Resident Evil 2 Remake and I think everyone should check it out.
GDC was last week. I’ve been trying to absorb what I can from afar. It very much looks like Ray Tracing is the future of game graphics, although I think we’re a few years out from wide adoption. I have been approved at work to get an RTX card once a few PC setups are taken care of. Unreal 4.22 will have RTX support and I will be looking at how it can enhance our real time work. That will be very fun.
Unity 2019 looks cool. Every time I see some of their stuff I want to jump back in. Same with CryEngine/Lumberyard.
That’s it for now. I hope to be back with more posts a bit more regularly after I’m married ?
-Dan