Blog Updates 11/5

Hey folks, sorry for the radio silence. This update (and most of my updates for the next month or two) are going to be short and sweet. It's a necessary evil due to the fact that I'm about to graduate and therefore have things like job hunts and thesis defenses to contend with.

So what have I been doing on the project this month? We decided that it would be a good idea to sit down and try to document some of the more complicated processes so that when we tag new designers in they'll have some idea which way is up. To this end I've been working on a couple of how-to guides that will serve as a step-by-step tutorial for our rather eccentric export process.

The first guide concerns getting a PC set up with all the programs used in the pipeline. That indcudes Microsoft Flight Simulator X Acceleration (FSXA), the FSXA SDK, Dropox, Subversion, Maya, 3DS Max, GMax, and Paint.net. Just getting setup to do work is a fairly extensive process.

The second how-to guide actually shows you how to move assets through the pipe. In true project management fashion I've been taking the 'blithering idiot' stance for writing the guides - they're very explicit and very thorough. I mean, I've personally had some rough experiences with the user manuals that autodesk published for Maya. I know how confusing using most of the high-end modeling software suites can be for those of us who aren't already in the know.

I've been doing all of this while shooting assets through the last legs of the pipeline myself. More than anything else this experience has taught me how important it is to have tech guys who can make your artists good tools. The project has been suffering throughout its lifecycle from slow iteration and there really isn't much that we can do about that given our current resource pool.

It's probably the biggest takeaway that I've got from this experience.