A Day In The Life of a 3-D Artist

7:45AM  Wake up, get dressed.  Eat breakfast of toast and tea.

8:30AM Head to the bus stop.  Knit while waiting for and riding the bus.

9:00AM Arrive at work.  Clear out email from the week of being home sick with swine flu.

9:30AM Get started on a modeled floor system for use by the level designers.  This essentially requires the creation of a whole lot of flat planes in specific dimensions, with collision (so the player won’t fall through) and specific unwraps so the materials will tile properly.

10:30AM Team meeting about the current project.

11:00AM  Team meeting finished.  Back to work on that floor system.

12:00PM Go out for some “Hurrah!  I don’t have swine flu anymore!” ramen with a friend.

1:00PM Arrive back at the office.  Discuss the finer points of PAX with a co-worker.

1:30PM  Back to work on the floor system.  Duplicate, move points, unwrap, collapse, unwrap again, collapse again, repeat.

3:30PM A co-worker announces that a tour bus has managed to get itself stuck on the hill outside the office.  Head to the window to look.  Indeed it has, and now a tow truck is pulling it back up the hill, causing some very large gouges in the asphalt as it does so.  We hoped the bus would try to make the turn again after building up some steam this time, but no such luck.

3:45PM Back to work on the floor system.  Most people won’t tell you that this kind of modeling is probably 70% of a 3-D artist’s work.  Everyone likes to think they’ll get to model awesome steampunk shit, but that can be outsourced if it’s just decorative.  The actual, meat-and-potatoes pieces that make up the gameplay space are too important to be outsourced, though, so people like me get to do them.  And then the awesome steampunk stuff gets all the attention.

5:45PM Finish the first pass on the floor system.  Hurrah!  Shut things down and head home.

6:15PM  Arrive home.

7:00PM Make dinner.  Homemade mac and cheese, nom nom nom.

7:30PM  Blog.

8:00PM ???

8:30PM  Profit!