My 2012 in Review
2012 blew by incredibly fast. If I had to sum the year up into three categories it would be:
- RYSE / CINEBOX: At Crytek, for the first time ever I broke away from the Crysis franchise and have been working on Ryse with my old friend Hanno Hagedorn, who returned to Crytek this year. In my ‘20% time’ I am still on CINEBOX, which saw some of it’s first production use this year on some high profile film and game projects, but I can’t say much more than that.
- MAYA: New project, new team, and new software/pipeline! I mentioned this in my SIGGRAPH class, which cleared PR, so no issue mentioning it here: Ryse is the first Maya project at Crytek. In the past year, with the help of Crytek UK, we have been building up a Maya pipeline from scratch. The 3dsMax pipeline was ~10 years old and had a lot of legacy stuff. Any Maya studio I have worked at always had a legacy pipeline, and I had a mental checklist of things we all would have done differently ‘if we could rewrite everything’. It has been really fun working with the Ryse TechArt team to build this pipeline, we have some really great guys (and gal!), but I won’t out them here. (to the dismay of recruiters everywhere)
- DIVING: This year I spent a lot more time in the water! Not only diving, but I stepped up my photography; nothing raises your pulse like a changing lenses out over a 200m dropoff! Colleen and I were lucky enough to get to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Egypt. (video, photos) We stayed on an old oil rig off Sipadan where we met a group of great photographers, one of which was Sin Hwa, who took that photo of me above.