Haho! I could be working. But why work when I haven't posted anything on DeviantArt in a year and I can TOTALLY distract myself for an hour or so.

So, lets recap. I'm graduating! End of this quarter anyhow. Which is a quarter later than anticipated, but I supposse its all good anyhow. Don't have a ton of work from the last few quarters that I can post up. Maybe I will track down a bit later to distract myself further, but most of my work has been in animation and less visually apparrent forms.

I spent this last Summer and Fall terms in a production class, creating a single player total conversion mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. Despite my opinions of the end product and the game it was decided for us to make, at least MY contributions were bad ass. Of course, little of it is showable in a still 2D medium. Some of it was animations for characters, and a lot of it was rigging up characters so they could be animated. Apparrently it was discovered the first quarter that I am a bad ass character rigger, at least better than anyone else in the class. Of course, after that was discovered, I had to rig all the characters and those whose job it was originally no longer had to. Slackers.

I also spent Fall term working a second project, another team project but this time a short rendered movie rather than a game. We got a decent amount done for the class, met the class expectations, but didn't quite finish it. Still lots of texturing, animating, dynamics, and rendering left to do. I think we could have finished it, if it weren't for the fact that most of us working in that project were also responsible for 75% of the work in the Game Project class at the same time. Maybe I'll get some time to finish a bunch of that this quarter.

This term we are doing another team game project class. This time, however, we are doing it in the Source engine as a single player total conversion mod for Half-Life 2. This time I'm actually excited about the subject of the game, which bodes well. It has, however, been pretty much decided that I am not going to animate this quarter as I'm one of the only technically competent people on the team (not that I'm competent and they are not, that I am competent in technical aspects of the process and most of them are not... thats what I get for going to an art school). So I am pretty much the lone character rigger and responsible for figuring out the technology of getting all of the models/textures/animations/etc into the engine. I was also one of the main level designers though I think we are getting more people on that so I may be coming off other than to implement particular technical aspects.

So while I will be graduating with an "Animation" heading, I think I am pushing/being pushed towards more of a "Technical Artist" position. I guess I'm not terribly upset by this. I enjoy both aspects, and I would get paid more as a Technical Artist.

Other than that, I'm planning to head down to San Jose at the end of March for GDC (Game Developers Conference). Looking forward to that, much exhibits, much talks, and much career people to schmooze with and get a job. My understanding of the current plan is that everyone I am going to school with currently and is going are going to pool our efforts for contacts and getting me a job. As I graduate a quarter before everyone except one guy, it will then become my job to all get them jobs the next quarter when they graduate. High end goal is to shoot for Valve in Washington. After that maybe Blizzard in California, Microsoft in Washington, or Bioware/Pandemic Studios in Canada (Canada!?). Heh, we'll see how that pans out.

~ Geoff