The past few weeks have gone by pretty quickly. Work is still exciting and I learn new things every day. I started getting into physics simulations and linear algebra programming. You can do a lot of really cool things once you know a few basic concepts such as vector/matrix math, cross products, dot products, etc. When you hear TD’s (Technical Directors for you non-industry people) should be good at math, they’re right. Not all TD’s know or understand this material but they are still really talented. But the ones that do understand it can go above and beyond creating really cool systems. I’m finding it a lot easier these days to read a SIGGRAPH paper and actually understand it.
I had an interesting conversation today with some of my coworkers about sharing knowledge and source code. If you’ve read my site before, you probably know that I like to share my knowledge with people and give away code and such for free. People helped me when I was learning and I like to return the favor to others. Someday, I would like to write up some pages on character rigging and coding with Maya but now that I work for a company, it can be a bit more complicated. If I were to post code and certain techniques, I would now have to be careful that I’m not posting too much that could be deemed sensitive company information. I realized this is why there are not really any in-depth production worthy character rigging resources out there. Most of the knowledge is learned on the job and most of it is specific to the company’s pipeline. As a result, a lot of this work and knowledge can be seen as belonging to the company. So what can be shared or posted? Unless we have specific permission, we could probably only share extremely dumbed down versions of tools or plug-ins. Maybe even break down material into the fundamental building blocks that the material is based on and not even talk about the specific tool at all. With physics simulations, for example, I could probably only write about the basics such as vector math and verlet integration and then leave it up to the reader to build upon these principles to make complex systems. Now if I were to go out and find a SIGGRAPH paper and implement it and modify it on my own time and equipment, could I talk about that? Maybe. But it could be seen as knowledge relating to my work. It’s a tricky area that I’m not too knowledgeable about. Once I’m in the industry longer, I’ll probably have a better idea about this.
). However, I also found that it ultimately depends on who exactly you’re working for, not strictly because you’re working in the industry. My opinion here is from the game industry heh, but still; If you’re working for a small company, a slightly more relaxed work environment, their opinion on that situation might be totally different, IMHO.