In our booth at the Austin Game Developer’s Conference earlier this year, Spacetime Studios set up a monitor, a machine, and a Wacom tablet. David Levy (vision director) and Joe Watmough (concept artist) took turns drawing concept images in full view of the passerby on the conference room floor. A real-time tight-rope act. If the artist isn’t skilled enough to pull it off, or was just not feeling inspired, it would be embarrassing. Fortunately, it was an audacious success, one we got a lot of credit for.

Folks would gather for hours to watch our artists paint.

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I’ll start with a brief introduction. My name is Robert L. Marsa, and I’m the lead programmer here at Spacetime Studios.

Massively-multiplayer online games are different from most other types of software in scope, complexity, and lifetime. Because of this, the technical requirements that are most important when building them are different from those of other software. What follows are my thoughts on the most important requirements:
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Over the course of the coming months we will cover a variety of topics including animation, shaders, automation, scripting, and modeling, showing you our studio tools and techniques which we use for developing art content. I’m sure that other developers have done this but we wanted to show you art development sort of under the covers – what exactly goes into building the art assets in a project such as ours.

To start off, we will be showing you the various stages of our cinematic and outsourcing pipeline. The art team at Space Time is an experienced crew; artistically and also technically. Yet we are spread about working with so many various authors from around the world and therefore one of the biggest challenges that we knew we faced was consistency and naming conventions.

To work around this issue we developed Autoskel, a tool that generates perfect humanoid character skeletons.

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