Introduction to Alienbrain

[Rick Stirling]

As part of my ongoing series of Game Art For Beginners, I've written a beginners guide to Alienbrain. It's designed to get you through your first few days of using it in a studio environment

GAFB: 03 - Introduction to Alienbrain

Leave comments, Digg it if you want. Clicking the adverts makes me rich and I need a new helicopter.

[Craig Lewis]

Nice article. At work we use Sourcsafe, which is similar, but I guess probably more rubbish.

Also why do you need a new helicopter? What happened to your old one?

[Rick Stirling]

I crashed it when trying to land on my yacht. It was my own fault, my mistress was pouring champagne all overself.

[Craig Lewis]

Bloody mistresses. What are they like eh?

[Rick Stirling]

Reet durty.

anyway, that was part of my Game Art For Beginners series - it's sort of a series of small articles based on what life is like in the games industry, aimed at epoepl who are trying to get or job or have just got one.

If anyone has any questions that they think might make a good article, just let me know and I'll try to work them in. I've got a fair few half written - polycounts, project timecylces, salaries etc. that will be online at some point.

[Craig Lewis]

Something I'd like to know. Not really a tutorial as such, but just a quick question.

How do you manage to find time to keep up to date with modeling techniques, new programs, etc?

Do you find you can learn a lot on the job?

Since getting a job I haven't made anything decent, and working on a ps2 title isn't much help in getting to grips with high poly modeling, etc.

[Talon]

Cool stuff Rick, thanks. Had a look around your site, there's a lot of good articles on there.

Seems a lot like the CVS systems we use at work (TortoiseCVS and another one that's built into the engine we're using). I'm guessing they're all much of a muchness.

P.S. It's evident you need a new mistress more than anything else, she appears to be the central cause of the loss of yacht, chopper and champagne. She's obviously bad news, ditch her quick smart!

[benclark]

I'd quite like to know how much of a character model is built from scratch. For a main character and for NPCs

Do you have base meshes you work from? or Head-Gen type programs? or is everything built uniquely for each title you work on?

[Talon]

^ Seconded. Some guides on expected time-scales would be nice and maybe some ways to improve them (by, as Alchemist says, reusing parts or having standardised base meshes to work off, what are common industry practices and allowances here, etc?).

I realise these would vary greatly from studio to studio and project to project, but an average 5-6k character with 1024 diff/normal/spec map ballpark figure would be kinda nice to know. I've heard anything from 1 week using reused parts to 1 month from scratch. Maybe I've just answered my own question, heh.

[Rick Stirling]

Not all artists take the time to keep up to date to be honest, but I try to. Just reading various sites on the net (feed readers are very useful) and hanging around forums will keep you failry up to date with what is new out there.

As for actually sitting down and learning it, I occasionally do this at home, but to be honest I prefer not to since I work with art all day anyway. When we got Zbrush at work a few years ago we all just sat down and played with - looked at tutorials on the net and got tore it. We learned off one another.

You don't need to know a package inside out to use it - I don't know Maya these days, I've never used XSI, but if I got a job where I had to use either of those packages I'd probably be up and running within a few days. The only major difference is the interface, the rest is pretty much the same from package to package. When we got a trial of Mudbox, we were creating things in minutes because we knew Zbrush and Silo.

So yes, learning on the job is something that just happens as a matter of fact.

Now, if you are making PS2 assets, you wont be learning highpoly on the job, so to speak, and you'll have to put in the effort to learn it outside your normal daily tadks - thoguh you can easily hack away 30 minutes over a lunchbreak. If you don' t have Zbrush/Mudbox at work, and they won't buy it, consider buying a copy of Silo. It has excellent modelling tools and displacement painting, and will set you back about £80. You can also install it on 3 computers, and its Mac and PC compatible.


I'm considering buying an aircraft carrier now to host parties - I'll need another few clicks.