This project has been on the bench for far, far too long. It’s time to get back in the game and start making things happen again. I’ve been sidetracked most of this year. Much of my time was spent working on two other projects and most recently the day job has been consuming my life like never before. What time I was able to spend on Newfound Room this year has been spent in learning mode — time spent on learning normal mapping and GIMP mostly, but also on learning new ways to do this type of on-the-side work without killing myself from lack of sleep and exercise. Now, however, the time is here to get moving again.

Thousander Club Update
Here it is! The home stretch is finally here… after, how many years now? 4 years? 17 more hours and I will have met my goal of 1000 hours spent making game art. Where do I stand after all this time? Stay tuned and I will provide a nice look back at the journey at the end of the year. Also, I crushed my goal of 1000 miles of biking this year. That goal just got easier and easier during the year. So much so, that I even ride through hail storms and winds that knock pieces of the bay bridge down.

Previous Year: 737 hours
Total: 983 hours
Biking for the year: 1,543 miles

A New Challenge
Now that the thousander club is wrapping up and things are just starting to get rolling here on making new models for game devs to use, I will be taking on a new challenge. I’ll have more about it in the next few weeks, but for now I will simply state that I will be challenging myself to make and distribute a new free game asset every week for the coming year. I’m still debating on the details of how I will work it, but in short I will be putting a lot of focussed energy on making this site as strong as I can in the coming year.

Stay free
~shs~

Hooboy! what’s the right word to describe the last few months? Whirlwind? Flood? Avalanche? hmmm… how about crucible? That seems the best. I have new toughness forged in the heat of constant and overwhelming work. I have been so incredibly overloaded with work — both at day and at night that the amount of work I have been doing easily surpasses any amount of time I have done in previous years. The bad thing about it, besides losing sleep, is that it left no time for updating things around here. The good thing about it, which is something I had worried about as I was starting this site, is that I am now confident of being able to create a model a week for this site once I get going. I know this because I have done ten times that in a week on a few occasions these past months. I have been working on creating ways to alleviate the workload and hope to get on schedule here. Here are my updated stats for the year.

Previous Year: 737 hours
Weeks 3-12: 153 hours
Total: 890 hours
Biking weeks 3-12: 327 miles
Biking for the year: 391 miles

Stay free
~shs~

Here I am sitting on the couch watching one of my kids playing with Lincoln Logs, the other playing with K’Nex and I am thinking about how for the past three weeks I have been working on something very similar. I’ve been on a freelance project building modular pieces that people can use in social worlds to build complex structures. It must be genetic. Another busy week this week, spent almost entirely on freelance work, so the official launch of this site will need to drift back another few weeks. The great part about this work is that I have already managed to pay this year’s web hosting bills for this site and my portfolio. I also managed to get a big chunk of work done on my own newfound room (more on that later).

Previous Year: 737 hours
Last Week: 15 hours
Total: 782 hours
Biking this week: 24 miles
Biking for the year: 64 miles

Stay free
~shs~

Related posts:
I Return to the Thousander Club

What a busy, busy week! The year is off to a big start and it is fun to be able to jump back into the Thousander Club reporting with a big number. I had a big freelance project that I was on last week, so none of the time spent flowed into preparing newfoundroom for the official launch, but working so hard is definitely satisfying. Adding in the few extra days from between New Year’s day and last Sunday I came up with a whopping 30 hours. I’m also returning one of 2007 goals to my reporting — exercising. I am shooting again for 1000 miles of biking for the year.

Previous Year: 737 hours
Last Week: 30 hours
Total: 767 hours
Biking: 40 miles

Stay free
~shs~

Related posts:
I Return to the Thousander Club

At the beginning of 2006, I made a pledge to myself to work hard to become an expert at 3D modeling. I had based this on article from the GBGames site that talked about how practice is just as important as talent and that mastery of a skill is achieved after 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. Even 1000 hours can lead to the level of experienced expert. So, I set the goal for myself of not only devoting 1000 hours of my time to creating free 3D models, but also to reporting on my progress through the year. Now, three years later I am still plugging away at those 1000 hours and I am now devoting myself to once again start reporting the hours on a regular basis. I have been recording my hours, if not reporting them, and I currently stand at 737 hours over three years. The goal is to finally reach that 1000 hours by the end of the year.

One of the reasons I am bringing this back to my own blogging endeavors and transporting it over from the Low Poly Coop blog is that I want to put out a call to a renewed part of this challenge. I challenge every artist in the community to make some free game models — enough that we as a community can release 1000 models free to the world of game devs and students. I can’t completely manage a project like the Low Poly Coop in a way that is big enough to handle 1000 free community models, so I urge everyone out there who can to make some models, post them somewhere for download and get the word out. I already have a number of models to throw in the pot to get us started and I plan to complete at least another 50 this year. If enough decent artists get out there and do this, we could get to the goal of having 1000 free models in circulation. Join with me in making this a real goal.

Stay free
~shs~ 

I’ve been riding my bike to work every day since June, with the intention that I would rough it out during the winter, which in California is usually not too harsh. Last week, however, was the first time I had to contend with anything more than a light sprinkle. I found myself stuck in a hail storm, awash in sea foam along the banks of the San Francisco bay. At the start of the storm I stopped to place the rain covers on my panniers and as I got back in the saddle I said to myself (out loud no less — don’t laugh) “Head down. Keep going.” A good helmet, strong lights and a light jacket helped me reach home safely, hot and literally steaming. Yes, it is a small achievement, I know, but I arrived home with a determination to bring that attitude into my studio that night and power through an obstacle that had been troubling me for weeks.

One of the big steps I have wanted to make in starting this new project and moving beyond the low poly work with which I had become overly comfortable was to learn the pipeline for creating more modern game art assets. But, getting a normal map that looks the way it should has been a long slow process. My high poly model looked good, my low poly model looked good, but the normal map was just looking, how best to describe it… borked. I knew that the answer was there — I could plainly see where other people had mastered these newer techniques and I had surmounted obstacles like this in the past (UV maps in Blender, anyone?). But, getting there has been taking too long and has been delaying my goal of officially launching this site. I knew at some point it had to be a matter of obstinately pushing through and making it happen. The night of riding through the hail storm was also the night I got it. It makes sense now. There was one major thing I overlooked that was majorly screwing things up, namely that the normals were flipped in many places which a nice ctrl-n in Blender fixed, but there were also a number of little things that improved the overall look of the map. The important thing to note about this, is that I would never have known what these things are that so greatly affect the look of the normal map if I had not gone through the painstaking process of making mistakes and stepwise improvements. Here is the model as it stands today.

Here is one example for you to see what I am talking about. On the left is the normal map of one of the wires on the satellite dish at 300% before I made changes, the one on the right is after. The right image is a nice smooth image made up of mostly blues and purples. The before image is a mottled mash of tans, yellows and oranges mixed in with the blues and purples. Flipping the normals fixed most of this, but I also needed to go in add a few edge loops on the low poly model among other minor modifications.

The end result is still not perfect, but it is solid enough for me to say that it is done, and I will be moving on to the next step of preparing the textures for it. A couple more steps to go, learning GIMP well enough to texture and creating a spec map, and I will be moving on to one more learning project before I try to get into my regular rhythm. For those of you that I’ve promised stuff to, it’s coming — not as soon as I had hoped, but I’ll get there soon. My plan is to start spreading the word about this site at the beginning of the new year.

Stay free.
~shs~

Yes, No, Maybe so
As this series progresses, I’ll be describing many quantitative reasons for why I think a Studio Manager is a great addition to a medium sized or larger creative team. But, first in the next few posts I wanted to go over something a bit more qualitative and it is a topic that lies at the center of a Studio Manager’s mission. This is something that deeply affects the day to day quality of life for everyone on a team — making the decisions of if and when a project can be done and what resources will be needed to successfully complete it. How a leader of a creative group handles the decision making process and how a studio manager can help in improving this process is the single biggest reason I can advocate for hiring an excellent studio manager.

Yes, Man
If you’ve been in the working world for a while, I am certain you have worked with a boss who is the proverbial yes-man. This is someone who, without any solid knowledge of what is required to complete a project, will say yes to anything. Having been a person who then had to execute on this work that my creative director agreed to, the first thought on my mind is to question how on earth will I be able to get this done. This is a valid question to ask, but is not inclusive of the whole story. Most projects that are asked of a creative group are within the achievable reach of the team, especially in a tightly controlled and monitored corporate environment. But, this achievability comes with a caveat. We can do it, but we need the resources — resources can be time, people, more information, or any number of other things that will help get the big job done quickly. The quick answer to the question of how will something get done is that there is a way.

The more important question, and usually the second I would ask myself in the situation where I need to deliver on an unreasonable task, is to ask why the members of the team were not consulted first. “Why didn’t my lead just ask me?” In this question lies the problem of working with a yes-man in charge. Often these decisions to agree to work are made without any thought put into the process by which they are going to get done. A “yes” is not a bad thing — in fact, as a group, a creative team should be able to say “yes” 98% of the time. Saying yes to work is the way to get hold of the keys to opening doors to more responsibility and respect. It is the uninformed yes that is dangerous.

Looking at this from an art lead’s position, it is entirely understandable to want to agree to doing work, even work that seems unreasonable in scope or timing. We, as artists, all want to give off the impression that we are not lazy and flighty — that we are efficient and capable of doing great work under pressure. Soaring above expectations is a great way to convince people outside of our group that we are capable of initiating our own pet projects, that we should be granted respect for the work we do and that we are in so confidently in control that we know when we need more resources. If this issue is taken from the art lead’s position, it is easy to see how some can be blinded by these goals and will rush into judgement on the viability of any new work being asked of the team. There is this automated response that I have seen in every creative person I have known — “Sure we can do that”. The desire to exceed expectations, in itself, is not a bad thing. We should all hope to work with a leader who inspires us to work better or harder or smarter or faster. But making these decisions without first considering how the work can get done will demoralize the creative team and erode the confidence of business partners across a whole company. Let’s look at a few ways this happens.

The first and most immediate effect of uninformed promises is on the creative team itself. Working in environment where a worker’s input is not considered by the leader is demoralizing. An artist may not want much say in how work is divvied up across the whole team, but I can tell you that each artist I have known certainly craves being able to control their own work and time. All artists will go above and beyond, and many I have known have done so on a regular basis for years, but they will only do so enthusiastically if they are given the opportunity to be part of a process that elicits their feedback on how to get the work done. Cutting them out of this process entirely produces a team of reluctant drones — they will get the work done, but will never offer more of themselves than is being asked.

The larger impact of making uninformed promises is that eventually something will backfire. It could backfire in a big way — missing an important deadline for example. It could backfire in many smaller ways — having to go back to the requester and ask for more time, for example. Either of these happening, even once, can erode months worth of confidence building that may have been accomplished by exceeding expectations. Once people outside of the creative team see any lack of ability to deliver on promises, trust has been lost and the ability to make decisions will gradually be pulled away from the creative team, and that, by any measure, is a bad thing for a team that wants to excel creatively. Quite simply, you do not want the marketing director to be making decisions for the creative team — trust me on this it is bad news, I’ve seen it in action.

Self-help books and gurus often see a simple solution to the problem of saying yes too easily — to say no. But, as I will explore next time in this series, there is something worse than having a yes-man for a boss. After that I will continue with examining a couple ways that a team can benefit from having a good studio manager. Until then….

Stay free

~shs~

Links to the whole series
Adventures of a Studio Manager Ep.1
Adventures of a Studio Manager Ep.2

This weekend at my house was a big clean-out time. Old stuff was coming out of closets and boxes in our increasingly aggressive quest to rid our lives of clutter. For my part, I dug out two big boxes of old books and listed them on paperbackswap (my new absolute favorite site) and already managed to send out 5 books I was never going to read again which I will be able to exchange for 5 books my whole family will love for years as my kids learn to read one-by-one. The funnest (and funniest) part about doing a big day of cleaning out old stuff is that when old toys came out of the closet, the kids reacted like the were entirely new. To the youngest, the toys really were new because he had not seen them in his lifetime. But, even the older guys spent the whole remainder of the day playing with the newfound toys. It was like Christmas had come a month early! Best of all, it was without all of the letdown of over-amped expectations that Christmas brings. All that is old has become new again.

As I am still working out the particulars of processes that are new to me on my first normal-mapped model, I thought I would unwrap some new old models from the Low Poly Coop. After we released the Gilman pack of models I spent a period of a few months working extensively on a new urban-themed pack that has remained at almost a total of 20 unfinished models. I had never posted them before, so in a way they are new. Posting these here is part of one of my main foundation building tasks when I started this new site. Last summer the Low Poly Coop site was down for two weeks and, due to the project’s nature as a volunteer community-based project, there is always the potential that a short absence could eventually turn into a permanent loss. One goal for me in starting Newfound Room is to serve as a long-term backup for the downloads and preserving this valuable community resource in case of downtime. As a bonus, because I am using WordPress for this site instead of Blogger like I had at the coop, I now have more flexibility in the way the site is structured. So, not only am I able to post files as a backup, I also can now provide more information for each download file so you know a little more about what you are getting before you hit the link.

Click on through to the downloads page for some free model goodness. I still have a lot to add to the page, but here, for the first time I have included the new-old Ohlone pack work-in-progress. Enjoy!

 Stay free

~shs~

Alongside my posts relating to the development of art assets that I will be giving away here, I am also starting up a series of articles dedicated to explaining the intricacies of my weird little hybrid career. I will be focussing mostly on my experience as a Studio Manager, what I do, how my experiences can help you and your team, and most importantly, I will endeavor to prove that every studio full of creative people needs a great Studio Manager. This is partially self-serving because, frankly, I want to be doing this sort of job, or some mix of it, for a long while and I want you to want to hire me or someone like me one day to make your life easier. But, that is only part of it. The larger part of my mission here is that I have been on creative teams with no structure, no support, limited resources, and unfettered external access into our daily lives. As a designer on different teams I have lived with the pain and bitterness that comes with working in an environment that can best be described as chaos. I get it. I know how hard it can be. And, more than anything, I want life to be better for my fellow artists in this world.

But I’ve also seen what a great Studio Manager can do — I’ve learned from some of the best. I’ve seen how a team can blossom into a productive, efficient, proactive, balanced and happy team. The last two teams that I managed doubled their workload in a year and reduced overtime to almost zero. Designers went from always working behind deadline, making last-minute changes and spinning in circles over poorly-conceived reviews to nailing designs in first review, meeting deadlines ahead of schedule and having more immediate and direct access to real decision makers. I’ll get to how and why this happened as this series goes on. In short, though, I like to see what I do as the oil and the glue for the team. I keep the machine running smoothly, and I hold all the pieces together.

Every Studio Manager I have known has a different style — I have a very soft touch compared to most. Before I left the last place I worked for six years I questioned how portable my skills were, but having gone to a company that had no history of using a Studio Manager and basically had zero process when I joined, I see how important it can be in moving a team to the next level. I will over the next year talk your ear off about it. I originally backed into doing this 9 years ago, but now I feel like it is really my calling. Strange how life turns.

Now, getting to the beginning of talking about a Studio Manager’s benefits to a team, I feel it is important to define what a Studio Manager is, or at least the way I approach it. First off, I feel it is important to note that a Studio Manager is not an Art Director, Creative Director, or Lead Artist. I am not the person on the team that everyone reports to. I do not set the artistic direction, I do not make hiring decisions and I do not meet with the executive teams to discuss the direction of the team. I have always functioned best as more of a right-hand man — the leader on the battlefield whose job it is to make sure everything gets done at the ground level and let all of the artists look to the team lead for overall direction. Although much of my work involves shepherding projects through a process, I feel it is also important to note that I am not a project manager or a producer. A lot of what I do includes a hybrid of what people in those positions do, but I am firmly and solidly part of the art team and can do any of the jobs that each artist on our team does. I always makes decisions through the lens of a member of an art team, which is inherently different than the perspective a producer or project manager has.

Recently, a friend of mine who is an Art Director at a local game company asked me the simple question “So, what exactly does a Studio Manager do?” I had been asked this before and often found myself at a loss for words. However, I did come up with a response that I feel serves as an adequate introduction to this series. Here, almost verbatim, is what I said.

The details of what I have done have been different for every place I have worked… maybe the best way to illustrate is through an exercise.

Close your eyes and think of what the 3 main missions are for you and your lead artists. This would be different for each leader but they would probably be something akin to “making great art”, “mentoring my team”, etc.

Now, think of all the little day-to-day tasks that keep you from doing these things. All the tasks that you do up until 5:00 and realize that you haven’t done nearly enough of making great art and you’re going to be working all night. This could be anything — lengthy emails to outsource artists, sending files, gathering source material, archiving files, prepping screenshots for a magazine, updating the web site, scheduling projects, planning for vacations, filtering resumes, making budgets — anything that breaks the flow of the day. The list I am sure is endless. Most creatives I have known need nice hours-long chunks of uninterrupted time to be effective and this stuff can be a real killer. Any excessive lessening of the time you spend on your core mission as a team leader reduces your value and effectiveness to your team.

Now, imagine that all of that is gone — off your plate and off your lead artists’ plates, too. And it is being done by someone you trust will get it done, who will summarize the work for you regularly, who will keep things rolling when you are out and, given time, will know exactly when to get you involved. Most importantly, imagine that this person is also an artist (not a producer or a recruiter or an intern or an office manager) and will do all of this with an artist’s perspective. And, as a bonus, you have an extra hand on staff for crunch time.

That’s what I do. Times ten.

Stay free.

~shs~

Links to the whole series
Adventures of a Studio Manager Ep.1
Adventures of a Studio Manager Ep.2

For the past six months I have been riding my bike to work. I’m a big guy, strong but big. Getting rolling takes some effort, but once I am up to speed, I can travel with pretty consistent momentum. I try my hardest to find a path to work that requires the least amount of stops and starts. The worst is if I get stuck at an intersection with car traffic. Most intersections are graded to avoid flooding, which creates a large hump in the middle.  Starting from an intersection means starting on an uphill.

Art, for me, is a lot like this. Getting started on something new is an uphill battle. But, once I am over the hump, I can keep rolling with consistent momentum. The past few weeks have been all about this hump. I have been painstakingly re-examining every step of the process that take to create 3D art. I knew going in to this new endeavor that there were a lot of new skills I needed to learn and some I needed to relearn. It has been a great exercise to be able to take this process through step by step. It feels like a whole new way of working and in the end it will make the work I provide to the community that much better.

So, here is step one of the path, just about to get over the hump. This is a work in progress of my first hi-poly model, which will be what I use to create the normal map that I will apply to the low poly game model I will be posting. I’m not sure if I am creating this in the right way, but, you know, it’s all about trying and improving. I still have a number of steps to go before being able to get these out on a regular basis — here is a screenshot showing my progress.

Stay free.

~shs~