Wet Work

28 May (Thursday) (Rain) OJT - Game Effects (Trainers: Miyazaki-san, Ito-san)
Another day of OJT with more OJ than T, of the instructional kind that is. The PA Particle Editor is simple to understand and powerful enough to do a lot of interesting stuff. So my training would not be a technical, but a creative one.

I spent the whole day racking my brains on how to improve the FXs we were given to tweak. I guess creativity is something that cannot be learnt or forced out on demand. I had never done much hands-on FX work before, even through I've observed a lot of games and did some art direction in my previous job. The challenge is to do something I've never seen before and make it look cool.

Near the end of the day, another inspiration struck me and I tried something original, which paid off. So far I have been lucky creatively, since ideas for both the Fire FX from yesterday and the Water FX today just popped into my head at the last instant. Once I had the idea, it was surprisingly effortless to create the textures.

Thankfully, Ito-san (the FX Lead) seemed happy with my work so far, and I only had to do minor tweaks before getting my work approved. But I'm happy that I was able to create something original and contribute positively to the project.

Both Means and Ends
One thing to note about our Japanese host company is that not only is your final work important, the source files you used also had to meet specifications. I already mentioned that before with my work on the game character textures the previous week. The Photoshop PSD had particular layers and number of colors... etc, which had to be strictly followed.

In our current FX work, the naming convention for files and textures, naming of nodes within the FX source, size and format of the source and final texture images... etc, all had specified rules to be adhered to. These ensure that other members can understand your work process and changes can be made more easily by another team member.

From next week, we would continue with MotionBuilder training, working on character motion for a PSP game featuring a popular anime/manga title.