Siggraph 2015!

Siggraph is always a blast, and this year was no exception. I caught up with old friends and attended a lot of exciting talks and left feeling invigorated and exhausted at the same time!

The big topics this year were virtual/augmented reality and real time rendering (kind of like GDC actually).  The technology is becoming more advanced and the price point on the equipment is dropping, so a lot of companies are now investing money into VR with hopes of creating something they can monetize.

The good news is that this might translate into new jobs if the research bears fruit.  In general, I have noticed more hiring this year, and I cannott help but wonder if the interest in VR has something to do with it.  Companies will need artists and programmers to help create these new experiences.

Unfortunately, the one downside that I can see is the jobs in demand will center around people who can work entirely in CG.  If you are a compositor or a roto artist, you might be out of luck.  However, someone from ILMxLab did say that people have been researching recreating reality with footage of reality, so we will have to see if that research bears fruit, which brings me back to one of my earlier points.

VR is hot again.  In the past, people have gotten excited about creating VR experiences for the consumer only to have the technology not work out for some reason.  We will have to see if the research dollars actually create services or products that people other than computer graphics nerds want to buy.  I urge cautious optimism.

Noodling around...

Finally got around to playing with Unity this weekend.  Never underestimate the importance of noodling around and indulging one's curiosity.

C# and Unity

After a couple of months since GDC, I finally cracked open Learning C# Programming with Unity 3D by Alex Okita today.  This book is really targeted at the beginner programmer, which is surprising because I never considered using a game engine to teach programming (let alone C# programming).  Will let you know what I think of this...

Mel Syntax Highlighting For Sublime Text!

This is really exciting (at least for me)!  Someone has created a package that will do syntax highlighting for MEL in Sublime Text!

https://packagecontrol.io/packages/MayaSublime

Going to try this puppy out!

No 'var' on class fields in C#

This is why you can't have nice things...

Seriously, I struggled with this issue for two days before I wrapped my head around it:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/01/26/why-no-var-on-fields.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

Composition versus Inheritance

As I try to become a better programmer, I find myself tackling (for me) new coding paradigms.  Lately, I have been struggling to learn about the difference between composition and inheritance and when to use which.  This exhaustive Stack Overflow hits a lot of good points:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/49002/prefer-composition-over-inheritance#_=_

GDC Diary 2

Wow.  Never expected GDC to be so exhausting!  I'm not even going to any parties.

I have been noticing several trends:

• Mobile (and making money from)
• Virtual reality
• Alternative controllers
• Reaching an international audience
• Diversity (Actual the audience is much more diverse than I thought it would be.)

GDC Diary 1

Wow.  Talk about sensory overload.  I didn't expect GDC to be so big!  Everybody here reminds me of people that either attended the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science or the Cal Arts Character Animation Department.  My main problem is that there is almost too much to see and do.

I was pleasantly surprised that the Video Game History Museum had an Atari exhibit.  Haven't played Missile Command in ages!

Fixing homebrew after installing Yosemite

Well...well...installing Yosemite broke homebrew.  Big surprise.  I figured out how to fix it by checking out:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153790/how-to-fix-brew-after-its-upgrade-to-yosemite

>$ brew

/usr/local/bin/brew: /usr/local/Library/brew.rb: /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

/usr/local/bin/brew: line 23: /usr/local/Library/brew.rb: Undefined error: 0

>$ cd /usr/local/Library

>$ ls

Aliases/       Contributions/ ENV/           Formula/       Homebrew/      LinkedKegs/    Taps/          brew.rb*

>$ git pull origin master

...bunch of stuff...

Then you can run 'brew update'.

Understanding Python's With Statement

Turns out the 'with' statement in Python is fairly straight forward.  Here is an article (oldie but goodie) that gives a quick thumbnail sketch of how that statement works:

http://effbot.org/zone/python-with-statement.htm

On another note, this is the first blog of the New Year!