2015 Naughty Dog GDC Talks and Art Bootcamp
Learn about our best practices, techniques, tips, and tricks in tech, art, and animation by joining us for some informative GDC talks and bootcamps this year.
Mark your calendar for March! We’re back at GDC again this year with some great talks from various Dogs. We’re participating in daylong bootcamps for animators and artists this year in addition to having two talks in the more traditional tracks. If you’ve ever wanted to learn our techniques and best practices in tech, art, and animation this is a good year to attend GDC.
Here’s the full rundown of sessions and talks from our team in 2015. Please visit the GDC Schedule Builder if you’d like to add these to your calendar. Hope to see you there!
Bootcamp Organizer: Andrew Maximov, Environmental Artist (Naughty Dog)
Speaker: Robh Ruppel, Art Director (Naughty Dog)
Location: Room 303, South Hall
Date: Monday, March 2nd
Time: 11:45am - 12:15pm
This talk will cover how cinematography and concept art have evolved together over the years. Examples will be shown tracking art and photography styles from the 30's and 40's thru today's current state of the industry - a comprehensive look at how art informs photography and vice versa. Also discussed is how changes in film equipment and lighting have drastically changed to look of concept art. The principles of good composition still apply to both but film style and art style have piggy backed on top of each other producing a type of image that wasn't in the vernacular 20 years ago.
Speakers: Brianna Wu (Giant Spacekat), Mariel Cartwright (Lab Zero Games), Jonathan Cooper (Naughty Dog), Tim Borrelli (5th Cell)
Location: Room 132, North Hall
Date: Monday, March 2nd
Time: 1:45pm - 2:45pm
Diversity in game characters has been a controversial subject, especially over the past year. From claims that "women are too hard to animate" to supposed limitations in tech and resources, the fact is that there are many genders, races and orientations that are sorely under-represented in games. This panel will use its expertise in game planning & tech (Brianna Wu), large-scale animation direction (Jonathan Cooper) and independent, diverse animation creation (Mariel Cartwright) to discuss how game teams can plan for diverse characters and performances from an animation standpoint. It's time we stop relying on the age-old excuses.
Speaker: Damon Shelton - Motion Capture Pipeline Technical Director, Naughty Dog
Location: Room 305, South Hall
Date: Wednesday, March 4
Time: 12:00pm - 12:30pm
"Capturing The Last of Us" is a technical look into the design and development process for the motion capture pipeline developed for The Last of Us. In this lecture, you will learn about the needs, requirements and thought processes used to design the pipeline. You will also learn about the tools developed to create high-quality motion capture data, manage the large amount of data required to fill the needs of such a large project, and how to deliver this data to the animators. There will be a more in-depth look into the tools developed to clean up the raw data, turn this data into animation curves and the tools created to re-target the animation data onto the character skeletons.
Christian Gyrling - Lead Programmer, Naughty Dog
Location: Room 306, South Hall
Date: Wednesday, March 4
Time: 5:00pm - 6:00pm
This talk is a detailed walkthrough of the game engine modifications needed to make The Last of Us Remastered run at 60 fps on PlayStation 4. Topics covered will include the fiber-based job system Naughty Dog adopted for the game, the overall frame-centric engine design, the memory allocation patterns used in the title, and our strategies for dealing with locks.