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