Check out all the session videos by members of the Boston Indie Game Collective at Unite 2013! Michael over at the IGC put together a page with the talks by Disco Pixel, Owlchemy Labs, Popcannibal and Vermont Digital Arts! Check it out here!
Do you make 3D art, animation and or use Unity to make multiplatform Games? Anyone can download or make 3D art assets and anyone can make games in Unity. It is another story when it comes to creating an art pipeline that accounts for efficiency, flexibility, multiple resolutions for multiplatform optimizations. Art optimization begin in the tools one chooses to uses for content creation. Optimization is also dependent on the way tools are utilized and how they export assets for Unity. Finally, art optimization happen within the Unity editor, which varies for individual targeted platforms, with best art practices and smart coding.
Elliott Mitchell, co-founder of Vermont Digital Arts and the Boston Unity User Group, gave a Unite 2013 (Unity Developer’s Conference) talk on this topic last August in Vancouver, BC. Check out the video of his talk and check back here to see a series of blog posts on topics covered as well as the plethora of areas he didn’t have to touch upon in his talk at Unite.
[youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HwsJiLtyw&feature=youtu.be” width=”640″ height=”355″ autohide=”0″ fs=”1″ rel=”0″]
Special thanks goes to Anzovin Studio for providing The Setup Machine for Games to Elliott and Vermont Digital Arts. In addition, Anzovin provided their expertise by rigging the Elliott’s 3D Samsquanch character as well as animating an Idle and Walk cycle for this demo!
Remember, there is no optimized game without good coding even if your art is exceptional. Make friends with talented engineers or learn to code yourself! It takes both sides of the brain to make great games!
Front view of the Vermont State House (taken Sept. 23, 2004) – © 2004 Matthew Trump
Vermont Digital Arts is honored to have been invited to represent in the 2013 Vermont Arts Summit at the Vermont State House!
When: Saturday, October 26, 2013
Where: Vermont State House
Montpelier, VT
Elliott Mitchell, Vermont Digital Arts co-founder, will be speaking on the panel The Art of Great Digital Games:
Background art, character development, textures – each of these and many more forms of artistic output are essential to many of today’s most popular games. Narrative, music composition and sound design can drive some of the best in-game experiences. So why don’t video and mobile games have more credibility when it comes to art and arts-based learning? Hear from three developers of mobile games about the serious opportunities for creating and experiencing great art through personal devices. Through discussion we’ll explore ways classic studio skills can be augmented and deployed using mobile, hand-held, and PC computers. Moderated by Lars Hasselblad Torres.
Marguerite Dibble of Birnam Wood Games , Josh Buck of Champlain College , Daniel Moore of Toonuva Games and Lars Hasselblad Torres of The Vermont Office of the Creative Economy will be joining with Elliott on stage to speak about video games in the arts.
If you are interested in making games in the State of Vermont then Register here!
Vermont Digital Arts is back from Unite 2013! What a conference!
Elliott Mitchell (founder of Vermont Digital Arts) presented on Successfully Avoiding Common Pathways to Heartbreak and Disasters in Your Art Pipeline last week at Unite. Due to popular demand, keep a posted on a series of upcoming mini-posts relating to Elliott’s talk.
Overall I feel my talk was well received by the audience at Unite 2013. The audience was an interesting mix of artists and developers with various levels of experience in Unity and art pipelines. I realized I only had time to cover a fraction of the content I thought was important so I just went with the flow and covered what I could in the allocated time. I’m looking forward to authoring a series of posts covering my talk and points beyond!
-Elliott Mitchell (Founder Vermont Digital Arts)
Also we wanted to give a shout out to Anzovin Studio for the rigging and animation on Samsquanch with TSMG!
More to come….
New internal projects are in development at Vermont Digital Arts! We have been working on some original game designs and concept art for a variety of platforms including the Oculus Rift, Steam and a host of emergent mobile devices to be developed in Unity.
Vermonster Concept Sculpts by Elliott Mitchell ( Vermont Digital Arts )
Above is a sneak peak at a character rather early on in the concept art phase for an upcoming IP we are developing. This sculpt of a hybrid yeti-ape creature is modeled in ZBrush and is currently a whopping 13 million polygons. Today we hope to refine the basic form a little more then retopologize the creature in 3D Coat before modeling fine details and painting textures. It’d be great to hand a low poly version of this creature to our partners on the rigging and animation team at Anzovin Studio ASAP. It’s essential to identify problem areas in the geometry as early as possible and allow the animators time to work.
Check back to see a series of posts on the creative and technical processes that drive our development.
Tomorrow begins DevCon5 HTML5 conference in New York, New York. Elliott Mitchell, founder of Vermont Digital Arts, will be speaking on Thursday about why he recommends developing games in Unity on the panel: The Game Developer’s Dilemma. The panel description is as follows:
Mobile/social gaming is exploding, with smaller teams and smaller budgets developer can reach new market segments. One of the critical questions every developer needs to ask is What would be the best choice HTML5 or something else? HTML5 holds the oft heard promise of write once run anywhere. Unity 3d is growing in leaps and bounds and seems to be the most common multiplatform development environment for cross platform games.
Panel members include:
Alex Engel
Producer
Disruptor Beam
Elliott Mitchell
CEO & Founder
Vermont Digital Arts
Jonathan Myers
Creative Director
Reactive Studios
Monty Sharma
Director
MassDigi
Check out the rest of the DevCon5 conference speakers.
Hope to see you there!
Follow our Tweets from the event: @VTDigitalArts