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tech art tiki tech art tiki if it ain t broke it will be soon wednesday february 20 2013 why retarget missing bitmaps in 3ds max i was just reading a blog post by nick covington about retargeting missing bitmaps in 3ds max scenes he has a perfectly clever idea for doing so but i wondered why i ve never needed to write something similar for my users or rather why so many people feel that bitmap retargeting is necessary 3ds max has an external file paths feature found under customize configure user paths it allows you to list folders in which bitmaps can be found on your system regardless of where they were when first assigned for instance if you load a max scene containing a reference to c my_killer_art foo tga but that file or folder doesn t exist on your pc it will automatically look for foo tga in each of the external file folders until it s found it also works for shader files as long as you have paths in that list that contain all bitmaps your scenes could possibly use you ll never see another missing files error again so am i missing something do people just prefer to retarget in the scenes themselves rather than maintain that list of external file folders i don t but mileage might vary admittedly one limitation of that external file paths is that they don t automatically recurse into subdirectories if you have a folder below one listed there it will not look in that folder it needs to be listed explicitly rather dumb posted 3 32 pm labels 3ds max 4 comments thursday march 1 2012 perforce python api basics many python users working with perforce believe that calling out to p4 exe with subprocess is the only method available perforce actually maintains free native api packages for several languages including python the perforce python api is fast fully featured and easy to work with it lets you interact with perforce in a familiar python manner without having to capture and parse command line output parsing output is one of my least favorite things to do and i doubt i m alone there here is a dead simple example showing how to use the perforce python api to sync all files in a certain depot folder sync contents of a folder import p4 p4_api p4 p4 p4_api connect results p4_api run_sync project_x p4_api disconnect some notes on connections you ll notice above i first connected before issuing any commands with the api typically you do this once in your tool script run any perforce commands you need then disconnect when you re finished or the tool closes it will also disconnect when the api object falls out of scope and gets destroyed there s no need to open and close the connection all the time you can also use the with statement to easily manage the connection automatically disconnecting when that block of code is completed with p4_api connect connected here results p4_api run_sync project_x disconnected here going back to the top example as written it will simply use the default perforce port client and user if you want to explicitly set this and not use the default call the set_env function prior to your connect call new in version 2011 1 p4_api set_env p4client my_workspace next take a look at the run_sync command we issued one cool thing about the perforce python api is that the general syntax for everything is api_object run_ command args where command is literally the command string you would pass to p4 exe when using the command line interface examples run_sync run_edit run_add run_fstat etc if you know how to use python from the command line you already know how to use the python api above you ll see i captured the return value of our sync as results calls like this all return a single list of dictionaries one dict for each file the operation was run on in the sync example above it only has to update two files in my workspace so the results object returned looks like this totalfilesize 5299712 rev 319 totalfilecount 2 clientfile d projects project_x stuff dll filesize 4865024 action updated depotfile project_x stuff dll change 969310 action updated clientfile d projects project_x foo txt rev 134 depotfile project_x foo txt filesize 434688 looking at the second dictionary at the bottom you ll notice several keys indicating data from the sync operation for that file including the action updated added etc both the client and depot paths to the file and its new revision number for some operations the first dictionary returned contains some extra keys related to the overall operation such as the total number of files acted on and their total sizes on disk these returned results are full of any data you need to present friendly messages to your users being in simple dictionary form means they re flexible and easy to work with posted 10 20 am labels perforce python 4 comments sunday january 29 2012 old is the new new if you re seeing old posts of mine on the rss feed i apologize the code syntax highlighter i use stopped working and i had to modify several posts to get it working again for unknown reasons that causes the feed to treat them as new if anyone else uses blogger and knows how to avoid that please enlighten me posted 1 54 pm labels python 4 comments monday january 9 2012 gdc 2012 tech artist boot camp announcement i m organizing and mcing the tech artist boot camp at gdc 2012 in march the tabc is an all day tutorial format session on tuesday march 6 from 10 am 6 pm below is the session description and list of speakers topics we also plan to do a group panel style q a session at the end of the day i spoke at the tabc last year and it was an excellent way to reach out to and share with other industry tas i hope to see you there description technical art is evolving rapidly in many studios tas play key roles in developing efficient tools pipelines and ensuring art content is visually striking and optimized for performance tas bridge content and engineering helping make both more successful however many studios have still not fully embraced the ta role their tas are smart and eager to make an impact but are not sure how to best prove their value and be given key roles in development a group of experienced respected technical artists from across the industry would like to invite you to sit with them for a day and learn how to be a more effective ta focus on the tools and skills tas can use to demonstrate their value and further integrate technical art into their studios pipelines and cultures find the worst development problems at your studio and show them what a ta can do intended audience this all day tutorial is for technical artists and other developers of any experience level a light focus will be placed on techniques and skills useful to tas at studios with little to no tech art integration and culture takeaway at the end of this all day event attendees will understand key techniques to help them take technical art to the next level at their studios learn how to effectively work within constraints integrate into your teams communicate with other disciplines design better code and pipelines and master new shader techniques speakers topics welcome introduction adam pletcher technical art director volition inc you have to start somewhere defining the tech art role and building their team arthur shek technical art director microsoft studios turn 10 this session will go over the trials of moving from a job in film animation to a studio with a minimal tech art presence and the ensuing panic of change the tech art role has a soft definition and differs at every studio our common quality is that we are problem solvers and to problem solve you must have experience wide knowledge and the ability to scramble on your feet at times what we may feel pressure to know can be overwhelming relax you have to start somewhere better faster stronger teaching tech artists to build technology rob galanakis lead technical artist ccp games the success of tech art has caused a complexity of projects and tools for which our traditional skill set is under equipped tech artists are now building technology not just scripts and our essential growth must be as a cohesive team not just trained individuals in this session attendees will learn how to apply a few key practices of professional software development such as code review support processes and collaborative coding to the unique environment of tech art build it on stone best practices for developing a tech art infrastructure seth gibson senior technical artist crystal dynamics in this session we present a set of best practices for building tech art tools and pipelines in a stable maintainable and scalable fashion through the establishment of a solid tools development infrastructure geared toward the specific needs of technical artists joining the dark side how embedded tech artists can unite artists and programmers ben cloward senior technical artist bioware austin technical artists can be a powerful force to unify teams and ensure that productions run smoothly in this case study i ll show how the simple act of moving two technical artists into the programmers working area helped to improve the relationship between art and programming and resulted in a better looking more efficient game lessons in tool development jason hayes technical art director volition inc all too often the importance of planning the architecture of tools and pipelines in game development is overlooked in most cases project pressures often give us the false impression that we don t have time to plan or worse we actually save time by just getting it done nothing could be further from the truth this session explains why up front planning is important when to recognize over engineering and offers architectural design principles for effective tools development such as program organization data design scalability and user interface design internal tools developed at volition will be used to demonstrate these topics shady situations real time rendering tips techniques wes grandmont iii senior technical art director microsoft studios 343 industries this tutorial session will cover a variety of techniques that can be used individually or combined to solve a variety of game related real time shading problems it will begin with a brief overview of the current generation gpu pipeline followed by some hlsl basics the rest of the talk will dive into a range of techniques with a complete overview of how each one is implemented unusual uvs illuminating night windows in saints row the third will smith technical artist volition inc this session presents a holistic case study involving hlsl shader development included is not only the problem and its resolution but perhaps more importantly an insight into the technical artist s problem solving mindset throughout its resolution group q a conclusion posted 6 49 am labels 3ds max databases gdc python 0 comments monday december 5 2011 py2exe windows 7 vista i don t use py2exe very often but it can be a useful tool for environments that may not have an existing python installation i recently used py2exe on my windows 7 pc to build a small tasktray tool the resulting executable ran fine on my pc doesn t it always but threw an exception on any vista pc it was run on file win32com __init__ pyo line 5 in file win32api pyo line 12 in file win32api pyo line 10 in __load importerror dll load failed the specified module could not be found after more online searching than i d like to admit i found a post that said py2exe may be including w7 specific dlls when instead it should be leaving those out forcing vista to go find its native builds of those dlls i was able to fix the problem by adding two dlls to the dll_excludes list in my py2exe setup script options bundle_files 3 compressed 1 optimize 1 excludes excludes packages packages dll_excludes mswsock dll powrprof dll the tool now runs on both vista and windows 7 posted 6 40 am labels python 1 comments older posts home subscribe to posts atom about tech art tiki is adam pletcher s blog for technical artists in videogame development in his 27 years at volition adam has filled a wide variety of roles read more subscribe tiki archive 2013 1 february 1 why retarget missing bitmaps in 3ds max 2012 3 march 1 january 2 2011 3 december 1 february 2 2010 1 september 1 2009 6 december 1 august 1 june 1 may 1 march 2 2008 14 august 3 july 1 june 1 may 2 april 1 march 2 february 4 label me 3ds max com databases gdc maxscript outsourcing perforce photoshop python regex sharepoint wxpython sites of dubious value volition inc tech artists org tao cgtalk forums dive into python gamasutra zero punctuation adamsarcade com way of the rodent giant list of classic game programmers blogs i read the mouse vs the python 3 days ago stumbling toward awesomeness 7 years ago tech art survival guide 7 years ago hintjens 9 years ago tim golden 11 years ago copyright 2015 adam pletcher all rights reserved