#When I have to explain my art and the actual answer is “Unreal Engine lighting bug”

[pandadrake]

Another mystery of The Continent.

Source: that

[mvrtaiswriting]

;A; UR WRITING,,,, JUST CHEFS KISS! mwah! its so stunning! as for a request,, anything with jotaro n a enby or fem s/o! go wild:)

Are you bored yet? - Jotaro Kujo.

huhfsu thank you so much dear!!  🥺  

and sorry if this took way too long! here you have, i hope this meets your expectations! enjoy x

Neutral reader x Jotaro Kujo

Jojo’s bizzare adventures: Stardust Crusaders

AU

SFW // although there are some implicit hints to sex.

words count: 1663

Songs you should listen to / that inspired me for this work in terms of sound or lyrics: - Are you bored yet - Wallows - Sometimes - Ariana Grande

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© bearing in mind everything I post/write is my intellectual property so please don’t steal/copy and paste and post it as yours.

His ocean eyes were locked on you as he gently played with your hair, paying attention to every little detail of yours. Sometimes he’d shift his fingers to your face only to caress your skin softly, his touch so gentle and delicate, almost as if he was scared to hurt you somehow. You kept your eyes closed while you rested your bare back against his strong chest, enjoying Jotaro’s rare display of affection. Your skin shivered every time Jotaro touched it, as if every centimetre of you was a chord of an instrument solely created for his hands.

One of his arms was wrapped around your body, his hand lazily resting on your hips. You slowly turned to face him, a soft smile forming on his face. Running a hand through his untameable curls, your locked your eyes on his. “Are you bored yet?”

You whispered, not having the courage to speak out louder than that. You feared his answer, you knew he wasn’t exactly the type to stick around. When you two started dating, it took a while for him to let another person invade his personal space, or worst, his mind. He was used to be alone, and liked his own company so much he never actually looked for other’s.

With you, however, it was different. The more time you spent together, the more he wanted you to stay. It all started as a little study project; he needed some help to pass an exam and you offered him your help. Kakyoin, his best friend somehow convinced him it was a good idea and he ended up reluctantly accepting your proposal.

The two of you started regularly meeting every afternoon. Sometimes you would stay at your place, other times you simply preferred to stay at your school’s library. At the beginning, Jotaro was hard to handle. He would often cut off every attempt of conversation you made with some rude comments and never really showed any sign of commitment to your project. Unluckily for him though, you were stubborn enough to not step back when confronted with his harsh manners and his intimidating behaviour. Day after day, you slowly managed to get him to talk to you. He started to pay attention to you and cooperate during studying session, even bringing you coffee before you started – surprisingly enough. He also stopped being so rude around you, allowing you two to create a beautiful bond.

When he successfully passed his exam, he didn’t want to let you go. He wasn’t ready to go back to his usual loneliness; it didn’t matter to him before you came into his life, but he got so used to having you around that the thought of going through a day without your cute laugh almost teared him apart – and he hated it. He hated how much you mattered to him and how much his mood depended on your presence. He felt vulnerable, and stupid. It just wasn’t like Jotaro to feel such things, or to let his emotions overwhelm him, but he couldn’t resist it. He just couldn’t let you walk out of his life as if the time you spent together for weeks didn’t matter at all. He needed those afternoons of yours when he listened to you passionately talking about what you liked the most or just being your goofy self around him.

When he asked you out the first time, he didn’t even look at you. “I’ll pick you up at 7 tonight.” was the only thing he said before covering his eyes with his black hat and walking away from you, leaving you speechless. You weren’t expecting any kind of invite from him; you thought the end of your study sessions coincided with the end of the friendship you managed to create over that short period of time – but he proved you wrong and you were eternally glad for it. You didn’t know what exactly made Jotaro decide to ask you out, nor you knew if he felt the same way you did whenever he was around you.

Later that night, he showed up at your house on time, the raging and unmistakable sound of his motorbike was enough to make his presence known. He helped you getting on the saddle of the motor, handling you one of his helmets. Once you made yourself comfortable you wrapped your hands around Jotaro’s waist and held onto him tightly, resting your chin on his shoulder to have a look at the road in front of you.

“Ready?” he said.

You nodded, a small laugh leaving your lips. At your signal, Jotaro made the engine of his motorbike roar once again, running through the streets of your city.

Your journey took a while and you didn’t quite talk in the meanwhile. He was focusing on his driving, and you were too busy admiring the sky around you, which was coloured in pink and orange while the sun slowly set. Once you arrived, he parked his motorbike safely and took his helmet off. It was the first time you saw him without his hat and the view was simply mesmerising. You always thought Jotaro was handsome and he was always able to give you butterflies, but this version of him was completely new to your sight and once again you found yourself hypnotised by his undeniable beauty.

He took your helmet off and held your hand while you got off the motorbike, ready to catch you in case you’d trip over or stumble somehow. He smiled at you, causing you to blush – everything felt unreal. You almost pinched yourself, questioning about whether you were wide awake or dreaming.

He took a towel and carried a couple of beers in his hands, before making you follow him to the beach. You spent the night talking by the sea, as the sky slowly turned dark leaving you under the light of thousands of stars and the moon. He was unusually talkative, but you didn’t complain – you loved how soft his voice could be, and you were so curious about what was going on inside his head. You always felt a certain way towards him, and being able to stay so close to him without being pushed away not only made you feel special, but also made your feelings towards him grow more and more.

“Thank you for this.”

You said, resting your head on his shoulder. His muscles stiffed for a second, before relaxing again.

“It’s nothing.” he answered quietly, before taking a sip from his bottle of beer.

You looked up at him, the feeling of your warm breath caused goose bumps on Jotaro’s neck. A soft shiver ran down his spine before he turned his face in order to look at you, leaning a bit towards you, your noses nearly touching. You gulped, slowly moving your gaze away from his; as you did so, he placed his big hand on your left cheek, pulling you closer to him before living a soft kiss on your lips – catching you out of guard. However, you kissed him back and while the two of you found the right pace for your kiss, he slowly leaned on you, holding himself on top of you letting his arms support his weight.

Passion got the best of you two – being at the beach didn’t matter at all. You needed love, touch. Every inch of your skin was eager of Jotaro’s touch, and he just couldn’t get enough of you, of your kisses, of how you made him feel. That night felt as if you finally let go of all the emotions you felt, letting your bodies explain how much you wanted each other.

When he drove you home, he left a small kiss on your lips wishing you goodnight, before disappearing into the dark of the night.

The next couple of dates always ended up the same way; you just couldn’t keep your hands to yourselves. You weren’t quite sure what type of relationship you and Jotaro had. Was it just sex? Was he your boyfriend? What were his feelings towards you? Every time you saw each other you ended up in bed, or talking about everything but you and your relationship. You knew exactly what you felt, but you couldn’t quite tell whether your feelings were reciprocated.

He told you he didn’t quite enjoy relationship and what derived from them, and that was what made you so insecure about your relationship. You remembered him telling you how he easily gets bored of people, and how he wasn’t the type to be into someone for much. This small talk the two of you had time ago still haunted you like a ghost, and you just couldn’t ignore it.  

Until one day, while the two of you were lying in his bed, he let a “thank you for being mine” slip out of his mouth. That phrase almost made you jump, giving you an heart attack. “Yours?” you replied, your face lighted up with the biggest smile you ever made.

“Mine.” he repeated before pulling you in his arms, ready to start another round. This enabled you to finally gain the courage to ask him what was happening between the two of you. “Yare yare daze..” he sighed. “I thought it was clear we make a great couple.’ he said smirking.

Months with him passed rapidly. Both of you were living a true love story, enjoying every moment you got to spend together. --

“I’ll never get bored of you.” He said, placing a small kiss on your cheeks. “I don’t even think of letting you go, Y/N. I’m here to stay.” he continued, before putting you on top of him letting his hands wonder over every piece of your body.

“I love you, Joot.” you said, your eyes shining just as the first time. “Yare yare..” he mumbled before leaning in for a passionate kiss, not giving you the chance to reply and pulling the sheets over your heads, ready to show you how much he loved you.

[traumahound]

[INTERVIEW] A CASUAL CHAT WITH JONATHAN JACQUES-BELLETÊTE

The art director for Deus Ex: Human Revolution shares insight on cyberpunk and texturing furniture. Originally published April 1, 2011 on Totalplaystation.com

In early March, PAX East attendees were given a live gameplay demonstration of Deus Ex: Human Revolution by Eidos Montreal personnel, including Game Director Jean-François Dugas, Art Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, and Community Manager Kyle Stallock. The demonstration consisted of around 20 minutes of an early level in which the protagonist, Adam Jensen, infiltrated a warehouse using a combination of stealth, computer hacking, sharp implements, and bullets. Following the demonstration, I had the opportunity to sit down with J.J.B. and ask a few questions.

Though footage of the demonstration is not officially available, there is a walkthrough of the same portion of the game floating around on YouTube.

So, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. First of all, tell me what you do.

I’m the art director, so I’m trying to make it look pretty.

All right—

Really hard.

Managing a lot of people?

Yeah, I am managing a lot of people, definitely. I mean, there’s a structure. There are artists; there are leads on everything that have their units and whatnot. Overall, we must have close to 60 artists on this game, not counting outsourcing; we’ve had some people doing concept art and modeling outside, but in the studio, we must have a good 60 artists.

Speaking of outsourcing, the pre-rendered cutscenes are, I assume, done by another—

Yeah, all the trailers—in the game, it’s all in-game cutscenes, but the marketing stuff, all the big CGI, the E3 trailer, the extended trailer that you guys saw, that was all done by Visual Works, which is the cinematics department at Square Enix. You can’t ask for better than this. It’s like, “What!?” It’s so weird: one day, you wake up and suddenly your company is owned by Square Enix, and then two months later, you learn that you’re going to work with them on a trailer.

Is it a little intimidating knowing that now people have that in their minds, the look in those trailers, and now you have to sort of, in real-time, try to meet those expectations in the game?

Totally a legitimate question, and you’re absolutely right, but the way that it happened is that we had already set the style of the game’s visuals before we did those CGI trailers. At the same time, as an art director, I’m highly influenced by—I love anime and Japanese video games; we concede, and I say openly that there’s a strong Metal Gear influence on the game, and stuff like that. When Square Enix took our material to do the trailer, it was like we already spoke the same language. The way that I treat the textures in the game, there is no photographic material, just like the Japanese also almost never do that. Everything is done by hand or procedurally, so everything already seemed well-prepared for them to deal with it. So, yeah, you watch the trailers, and then you watch the in-game, and obviously there’s a huge gap, but it still seems to be a part of the same style; the aesthetic essence is exactly the same. I’m actually quite proud of that, really.

How did you arrive at the game’s particular style? It has a unique look: the color palette, I notice a lot of hexagons—

A lot of triangles.

Did you go through other styles on the way to find what you ended up with?

Yes and no. I knew straight from the get-go that I wanted to have a stylized game, that I wanted to have something that has its own signature. As an art director, I’m not into photorealism; it’s really not something that interests me all that much, because I find that credibility—photorealism and credibility are two different things. You can have a game where they put all their efforts into trying to make it photorealistic, but the game doesn’t feel credible at all. I’m not even talking about the “uncanny valley,” I don’t want to get into that, but the credibility of the game itself is not even there. You can have a Disney Movie, like The Beauty and the Beast, where you have a teapot and a cup talking to one another, and it’s totally credible, right? So there’s something there: why is it that when we strive for photorealism it doesn’t work, and something as low-fi as that works? So, anyway, let’s just say that I knew that I wanted to go stylized; I knew that I wanted a specific signature, and now, the hard thing was to figure out what that recipe would be. I knew that I wanted low—not low intensity, but (what is it, fuck,) often I find that in games, textures are too noisy, there’s just too much shit everywhere.

Right, as we gain the technology to add more and more detail to everything—

Right, it becomes a fest of just “pile some more stuff.”

—bump-mapping and making everything gritty.

[Points to nearby black leather couch four feet away.] If I just look at that couch from here, I don’t see texture in that couch. If I get closer I’ll see it, but not from here. In games, a lot of the Unreal 3 Engine games, from here it would look like it was grated or something, so that’s what I wanted to get away from. It looks maybe slicker, in that sense, but then we have fairly advanced shaders, so when you get close to an object, it’ll have really precise detail still. Yeah, the hard thing was mostly to figure out what the recipe was.

Is it intimidating at all working on this franchise? We’ve already seen what happens when someone makes a sequel to Deus Ex and it doesn’t meet expectations. Fans are going to hold it to a very high standard, maybe unrealistically high. If you go back and play Deus Ex now—

They almost have a distorted memory of it, yes.

It was kind of weird, because we also had to start a studio at the same time. Most of the early people, we all came from Ubisoft Montreal, and there were two things: to do a new Deus Ex, and it was also to put the studio together. We were renting offices, at first; we had nothing, barely any equipment, there was no team, the technology wasn’t chosen yet, there was no art bank. You know, for example, when we were at Ubisoft, we start a new project and for the first six months, just to get your thing going, you’ll be taking stuff from other games.

Like for placeholders?

Right, and we had no such things—I don’t know, maybe somehow because of that, it dampened the fear we should have had from having to make a new Deus Ex, you know what I mean?

Because you had so much stuff to deal with, you just had to get to work.

There we go, I couldn’t have said it better. Obviously, we knew how big it was, and we were all big fans ourselves. We knew about the pedigree, we knew about the fans, but we had to do it; we wanted to do it; it’s kind of like this make or break thing. You know, it’s the studio’s first game... maybe it wasn’t such a good idea! No no no, it was a great idea to attract people, actually. We just jumped in head-first, and put all of our eggs in the same basket. I think it’s looking alright; it’s not up to me to say how good it is.

The original game has some celebrity developers attached to it: Harvey Smith, Warren Spector; have they seen the game that you know of? Did you get any reactions from them?

Yeah, Harvey hasn’t seen it, but Warren has seen it, and he likes what he saw. I don’t want to hype it too much or under-hype it, because I don’t want to get into trouble, but I will say that he liked it.

This is kind of a small thing, but can you talk about the “item glint” system that you’re using? [The walkthrough demonstrated a yellow outlining effect to highlight interactive objects.] It seems like it would be hard to find a balance between making it obvious what you can interact with and avoiding something overly obtrusive.

It’s not so bad. One of my main art direction pillars was clutter. I wanted to have lots of props, lots of shit piled on top of everything. We realized was that, going through playtesting, it was a little confusing. That’s when we decided to go with that outline stuff, and like J.F. was explaining in the questions, I think it’s properly managed. It’s not like you open the door to a big room and everything lights up; you need to get into a proper distance, and there’s a rather small threshold in which it becomes highlighted, and it disappears as soon as you move away. Some people, it might not be their cup of tea, but in today’s market, if you make it too subtle, some people will just get discouraged. It has to be accessible.

Hey, you’re an augmented guy with crazy vision implants, so—

That’s our rationale behind it.

Speaking of which, cyberpunk as a genre has kind of fallen out of fashion, with the Internet becoming a mundane, everyday thing—

My feeling is that cyberpunk is what we live today.

How do you try to make it feel relevant today?

The way that we thought about it starting mostly, for me—we asked ourselves the question as artists: can we reproduce the visuals of Blade Runner on today’s consoles? The answer would probably be yes. But then, what would it say about the studio’s capacity for creativity? So, we wanted to bring something new. As you say, it’s not that fashionable; it’s kind of dormant, so that’s when this whole idea of the cyber-renaissance thing, which is not something that you saw much of in today’s demo, but it’s such a big game with so many areas that sometimes you feel it, sometimes you don’t, sometimes it’s omnipresent. That’s part of the idea to bring back cyberpunk, but with a twist to it.

The other thing is, when we started the first focus group for the game, kind of early on, maybe within the first year, testing out the early ideas and everything, we realized that here in the States, and in Europe, because we tested in both continents: kids nowadays? They don’t even know what cyberpunk is. Really, we could not believe it. You never would have thought, if you take a random chunk of 20 kids who all play games—even the hardcore ones—they’re like “Cyberwhat?” We thought, we cannot use that word! Nobody knows what it is. And, you know, we’re using it, but it really was a huge eye-opener for us.

[Gesturing to J.J.B.’s prominent tattoos] I can see that you’re a fan of Warhammer, you know, tabletop games. Have you played roleplaying games at all?

I played when I was younger.

Ever play Cyberpunk 2020?

The only roleplaying game I really played was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

An awesome game; lots of limbs getting chopped off.

Lots of limbs getting chopped off, yeah, inverting those numbers [a reference to the operation of the critical hit tables]. Yeah, as someone who was creative and wanting to make games, I would buy tons of roleplaying rulebooks, just to read them, and so I had all the Cyberpunk and all those things, and it was the same thing for Warhammer. Warhammer 40,000 is probably my most favorite universe ever, but I own all the rulebooks and all the codices, and I’ve never played the game. Never fucking played the game. I’ve painted the figurines. I haven’t painted in, maybe, six or seven years, because I just don’t have time, but I got to a really high level, where maybe I could start doing those competitions, like the Golden Daemon and shit, but then I just started running out of time. So, I got really into painting the figurines, really into the universe, to the point that—these tattoos are old; I was eighteen when I got them, but still, my passion for that universe hasn’t gone away ever. It’s just kind of weird that I’ve never played the game.

I have a bunch of miniatures, I’ve painted a lot, and I have a ton of the books, and I’ve never played it—

I have all the novels, all the rulebooks, and I love reading them, love the computer games. Alright, cool man, you’re like the first guy I’ve ever met who’s like me. I love to get into that universe, but I don’t really feel like playing the game that much.

Tell me about designing Adam Jensen.

It was tough. It was rough. It took a good two years to nail him down. We kinda knew the overarching design straight from the beginning. We wanted, obviously, not a big brute, there are enough of those in this cycle of consoles. We wanted him to have hair.

You’re crazy. Nobody is going to buy that.

There was this sentence that we coined at the beginning: “He can kick your ass, then he goes home and reads a good book.” We had this idea of, you know the French actor, Vincent Cassel?

No.

Have you seen Black Swan?

No.

He’s French, but he does a lot of movies here. Anyway, he’s a regular build, but there’s just something about his face, about his attitude. You think, “I would never fuck with that guy.” It’s just something that he emanates. And that’s kinda what we wanted. But, because we wanted the mechanical augmentations to be at the forefront of the game and of the visuals—that’s why often you see Adam from third-person, so you can see his arms—J.F. wanted his arms to be visible at all times. And, you know, he’s the creative director, so he’s my boss, but also, we wanted him to look like an agent who could be sent behind enemy lines, and at the same time walk into a high-end restaurant to interrogate someone.

It was a really hard equation to solve: he has to look like Solid Snake, and he has to look like James Bond, and you need to see his mechanical arms all at the same time. So we gave him a vest, and he looked like a douchebag all the time, like a biker or something. Every one of my concept artists had a go at it, where they would pool their energy to try to improve him, and it never quite worked. One day, Jim Murray, one of my concept artists, approached me, and—as simple as it sounds—says, “Let’s just make him two outfits.” One is kind of his battle gear, where you see his arms, and one is kind of his urban gear, because such a big part of the game is being in the city hubs, investigating and talking to people, going into rich places, inserting yourself into an apartment or whatever, and that’s when he’s gonna have his cyberpunky trench coat, and you’re not going to see his arms.

Again, as simple as it sounds, like holy shit. But then, we still had to run it by J.F. and the writer. Often, people don’t realize how a simple choice can be very complex to implement in the game, so we had a few meetings about it, and we decided to go with it. After that, within two months, Jim had nailed them; we had the jacket, which I loved. Also, the challenge was that when he has the jacket, he still has to be able to use the same augmentations. So, he has the claymore, the typhoon, where all those beads eject from his arms, so how do you do this when you have a jacket? Or when your blade extends backward? So we designed those slits in his jacket, and he has ports on it that kind of magnetize to the holes on his arms to let go of the beads and everything, so we kind of worked out how it works.

Yeah, so two months later, Adam was born, and the little pointy beard was kind of the Don Quixote thing, kind of the renaissance/baroque thing.

In the Icarus dream sequence in the trailer, you can see that the facial hair works in both settings. [This sequence features Adam surrounded by men in Renaissance-era garb.]

The Icarus thing was such a great find, in the sense that it was such a great metaphor for augmentations, because that’s what happens, right? Daedalus, his dad, gives him the wings so he can escape the maze, basically having wings is augmenting yourself. The feathers are glued with wax, so he says, “Don’t fly too close to the sun, or the wings will melt,” but he has so much fun with the wings that that’s what he does, and then he dies. That’s a bit like what it is with augmentation; if you overdo it, like with anything in life, you might burn yourself. We though it was such a great analogy for that.

Do you personally have a strong opinion on transhumanism?

Strong? Not necessarily, I wouldn’t say strong. I’m not intensely passionate about the pros and cons, but I think it’s inevitable. I think it’s one of those things that we’ll need to have laws, and we’ll need to have ways to control what will happen. There are going to be big mistakes, like with everything. There are mistakes made all the time in medicine, the military makes mistakes all the time, but I think it’s inevitable. If we try to stop it, there will be underground, illegal shit, and stuff like that. I’m quite convinced that in the next, maybe, 40 years, we’ll be immensely transformed. From all the stuff I’ve read, the specialists we’ve met, I think we’re going to see some crazy shit in the next 30 years.

Globe-trotting was a big component of the first Deus Ex; you cover a lot of mileage. Do you do that a lot in this one?

Yes, there’s definitely a lot of variety, yup.

One thing that the first game kind of failed at was giving the impression that you’re in a larger world. The city areas felt a bit constrained. How did you approach that problem?

It’s funny, as the cycles of consoles and technologies evolve, the constraints somehow always remain the same. OK, Grand Theft Auto, it’s immense or whatever; it never seems to end, but, for example, what you do with the NPCs is very limited compared to Deus Ex. Anyway, you add all this stuff that you can do in Deus Ex, and suddenly you don’t have the power to do a city that big, so we had the same constraints. Don’t get me wrong, the city hubs are quite big; many, many streets; tons of alleyways and buildings to get into, sewers to get into, rooftops... all that shit. At the same time—at some point you can’t go further, and you need to find tricks to convey that there’s a sprawling city around you, and why that path is blocked when it seems like it should be open. It’s a very common game design problem.

I remember on Splinter Cell at Ubisoft, it was the same thing. “This street is blocked, why?” And I would be, like, “Maybe some guy is moving out,” so there’s a big truck, and stuff like that blocking the street. It’s very common. But honestly, I think we manage rather well in Deus Ex. And then, there are compounds that you go into, like office buildings and secret laboratories where those limitations aren’t as important anymore, because you are in a confined area, but for the city hubs, I think we get away with it quite well.

A big feature of the game is having multiple approaches to every situation. Is that frustrating, especially being involved in the art side, because there may be significant chunks of the game that a lot of players won’t see?

Frustrating? No. I wouldn’t say it’s frustrating, because, obviously, we try to make the coolest stuff in the critical path. Now, that being said, it doesn’t mean that side-quests or whatever don’t have their own things, but you can manage; you just try to make everything look cool. I don’t know if we succeeded. I have a really hard time saying, “Oh, this doesn’t need to look as cool,” or whatever; I try to put just as much energy into everything.

I guess your question is more—if some people don’t see some of the cool stuff we’ve made... It is going to happen, but to some degree it’s kind of cool. They’ll be talking to their friends and they will have seen it, even if you haven’t, and I think it’s all part of the trip, really. But it’s cool, because I’ve worked at companies before where they never would have allowed us to do that.

It seems like a waste of resources.

Exactly. Some companies are so into every penny you spend, the player has to see it. Which is very rational when you think about it; it makes total sense, but sometimes making a game that gives you a specific feeling, that gives you that flavor so that once you’ve turned off your computer and when you go to bed you’re still thinking about it, it’s also a game that has all these things that are not just thrown in your face like that. But, that is quite expensive to do.

So, I’m guessing you can’t say anything about Thief 4.

No.

I figured.

That would be the death of me. No, it’s gonna rock your socks off; there we go.

Just how awesome is it?

Super awesome. Super-duper awesome.

No, it’s a great team honestly; tons of my friends are there. The art director is a great friend of mine, and uh... I’m not even sure I’m allowed to say that, so I’ll stop there.

It seems like a similarly ambitious sequel to make. Like with Deus Ex, fan expectations are off the charts.

It’s the same thing, exactly. I think it was really... that’s what we wanted to do with that studio. If we open another goddamn studio in that city? We do it strong or we don’t do it.

**In the first game, J.C. Denton is kind of inept in the beginning. It’s surprising that he’s supposed to be this super-spy, but he can barely fire a gun straight. I assume that Adam Jensen is a bit more capable right off the bat. **

Big time, yeah. Also, the shooting is something that right from the get-go, me and J.F. agreed that the shooting skill of Adam Jensen is going to be the player’s shooting skills. In terms of that, it’s a full-fledged first-person shooter. You know the crosshairs there? That’s where the bullet’s gonna go. You can still augment him in some ways to be a better shooter, like for recoil, or stuff like that. All the weapons are fully upgradeable, so that aspect of RPGness is still there, but where you shoot is where you shoot.

I’ll admit that I cheated to max out my skills in Deus Ex and found it a lot more fun that way.

The skills—that system was quite punitive.

You do have an upgrade system in this, where you earn your Praxis Points and unlock augmentations—are those scarce enough that you can’t get every upgrade by the end of the game?

You can’t max everything in a play-through. You can become the jack of all trades if you want, but you won’t be an expert at everything, or you can really invest in a branch.

If somebody specializes very much in, say, stealth, and therefore tends to use that to get through every encounter, do you think that can become monotonous and discourage people from experimenting with the other techniques?

Hmm, that’s a good question. It’s never been asked to me that way, specifically. I hope not. I don’t think it is—the way we’ve designed the challenges is that they’re never molded for one style of gameplay. It’s not like you get to an environment where it’s like, “Here you have to play stealth.” We’ve shown a quick example of that in the demo: if you wouldn’t have been able to disable the turret, there was that passage on the side. Usually most challenges are set up that way, but not as obvious as that; it’s built quite like the first one in that regard.

Are you absolutely sure there are no blue laser swords in the game? [A reference to a question asked during audience Q&A]

As of right now, this time, today: absolutely sure.

Thank you very much, I really appreciate it.

It was awesome, man. Great questions, thanks.

[bentonpena]

Surprise – NVIDIA’s AI and graphics news today for big industry is relevant to artists, too

https://bit.ly/3mHQJfP Surprise – NVIDIA’s AI and graphics news today for big industry is relevant to artists, too https://bit.ly/3wIEvZ4

Even as NVIDIA has a keynote with simulated robots making the rounds of a BMW factory, some of the GPU giant’s latest brings industry- and enterprise-grade tools to artists, too. That also could prove relevant as the pandemic has folks looking for work.

Music and live visual work means one thing – stuff has to happen live. And so that makes these chips more interesting. It means that fundamentally what musicians and artists do, which is to work with materials live in time, now matches up with the way graphics (and AI) chips work. Since they’re crunching numbers faster, it means the ability to create “liquid” interfaces. (That was the concept interactive visionary and legend Joy Mountford introduced years ago in a talk we had together on the South by Southwest stage, and it’s stuck with me.)

Now, I won’t lie, some of this is awaiting GDC, the game dev event. That’s because when you don’t have a BMW factory-sized budget, the punk-style approach of gaming has a ton of appeal. (You can see a bunch of gamers complaining on YouTube actually, I think misunderstanding that this is not a gaming keynote and … that’s coming later and … NVIDIA has always had workstation customers. But we know gaming trolls are not the most reasonable folks and – I for one enjoy watching Mercedes Benz simulate the Autobahn. It’s the Kraftwerk in me. GTA: Normal German Life Simulator. The Edeka parking lot is off the chain.)

But having listened to NVIDIA talk about their new offerings, I think there’s more here than just pro and enterprise applications and the usual workstation / gaming PC divide.

Follow along as there is a ton of geeky machine learning, metaverse, Omniverse, and 3D artistry stuff coming – https://gtc21.event.nvidia.com/

Omniverse

The big pillar here that impacts audiovisual creation is Omniverse. I wrote about this connected platform for collaboration and exchange of all things 3D, built on open tools like Pixar’s very own USD file format (also a subtle hint that y’all can make bank with this stuff):

This week, we get a lot of the questions answered about where NVIDIA was going strategically.

But yeah, if you’re wondering if this could allow audiovisual artists and musicians to connect to big-budget projects – at a time when even the shows you watch at night (Mandalorian, cough) are made with these tools? You bet.

First, the most exciting detail for me was a commitment that Omniverse for individuals and artists will always be free – meaning anyone can get at this platform. That also means that individual 3D artists and AV creators can play with big industry – so it’s a source of gigs.

Also, the Omniverse pricing is not astronomical for those “enterprise” use cases. A small team can buy into it at a per-seat license of $1800 a year, plus a $25,000 cost for a nucleus server. That’s within reach of interactive and design shops, and it seems NVIDIA may even work to adapt to those kinds of small use cases even beyond that.

Omniverse on a shoot? Yes.

I expect NVIDIA may even be underestimating the demand for those individuals – partly because as their tools and partner tools get massively more powerful and easier-to-use, it may not even take an entire team to do great work.

Now, the wait is on just for connectors. 3DS Max, Photoshop, Maya, Substance, and awesomely, Unreal Engine are all supported. But keep an eye out for Blender, Marvelous Designer, Solidworks, and Houdini for even more sign this is on.

It’s an open beta; keeping an eye on the convention is a chance to stay posted:

https://www.nvidia.com/omniverse/

And yes, yes Unreal:

The new RTX stuff is here

It’s tough to mention anything to do with semiconductors right now, given the global shortage that’s on. But yeah, the new pro RTX architecture looks predictably insanely great, for anyone doing real-time visuals, rendering, graphics, and AI.

So, if you’re planning to make your proud reentry into music festivals in 2022 with that fully immersive 3D opera involving live artificial intelligence, you’ll want to go ahead and write these into the grant application.

Desktops get the A5000 and A4000. Laptops get A2000, A3000, A4000, and A5000.

“But how will I fit them in my case?” the tiny man wonders. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” And then he stares into one too long and a whole Kubrick dream sequence starts, alas.

Either way, you get all the new technology for tons of creative use. Also, even though there’s the mention of “pro,” these laptop chips fit in low-power, thin and light machines. You could wind up buying them in a reasonably inexpensive notebook computer and using it to run a live stream.

Even apart from all the utterly essential graphics applications, that’s good news for music, because the ongoing pandemic ripples are likely to disrupt at least some international travel for the foreseeable future. Oh yeah, and it also means thin-and-light PCs with NVIDIA architectures to compete with Apple’s own silicon solutions. (I wouldn’t write out Apple from possibly future pro interoperability with these architectures, too.)

Yep, laptops will have these – though keep an eye on the semiconductor shortage to see what’s shipping when, as it’s … a doozy, generally.

But the performance gains are huge – in short:

RT cores with up to 2X the previous generation’s throughput (for tracing your rays, shading your whatever, all that jazz)

Third-generation Tensor Cores, also up to 2X throughput (so you can make a HAL that might open the pod bay doors even before someone has to ask)

CUDA cores (2.5X FP32 throughput) for … everything (and possibly even some audio/music applications, but certainly anything that uses the word ‘render’ in it)

Assuming some pros are the right generation for this, so – “It will be mine. Oh yes.“

Specific to desktop:

Up to 24GB GPU memory (or even 48GB with a two-GPU NVLink rig)

Virtualization (tell the server admin)

PCIe Gen 4 (twice the previous bandwidth – yeah, you might want your actual data transfer to catch up with the chip specs above, so this is essential)

Specific to laptop:

Third-gen Max-Q – so it doesn’t sound like a you’re vacuuming the carpet any more (“whisper” quiet is the phrase you want)

Up to 16 GB GPU memory

Also specific to pretty high-end workstation laptops, the the NVIDIA T1200 and NVIDIA T600 refresh of the Turing architecture is out. (That either means something to you because you use multiple-application workflows, or nothing to you and is a cool name.)

I might note, too, that these don’t look quite like the specs of that Apple Silicon stuff – not at the M1 level. I think it’s safe to say that for now, these are different use cases. But I also wouldn’t worry about it, either – the general scene is that working with 3D, video, AI, and streaming all get substantially easier in 2021 industry-wide, once chips get out there.

I also can imagine making an investment this year that lasts a good while, which is what happens when you do make a generational leap.

AI on the cloud

Without going into too much detail (I’ll leave that to NV), there is also a bunch of news this week for delivering GPU acceleration and (crucially for servers) AI computation via the cloud. There are a lot of “cool demo!” capabilities – machine translation, speech recognition, face recognition, eye contact, and live video processing continue to evolve through machine learning techniques from NVIDIA. (Yes, that also means more uncanny valley stuff and questions about the fabric of society, surveillance, and reality.)

But it means the ability to do stuff with big volumes of data, and in a way that doesn’t actually require you to be a huge enterprise to use.

This also deals with science – meaning artists who do understand machine learning now can make these topics relatable to the public. That’s potentially important, as we live in a world that demands more scientific understanding. (NVIDIA included an AstraZeneca chemistry example – and suddenly our lives are all revolving around that chemistry.)

I’ve been critical of some of the very examples NVIDIA uses here – like Spotify making playlist personalization more “efficient.” That’s nothing new – automating music based on trends and profit is basically as old as the music industry. But to really be able to criticize these things, I think it matters that musicians can understand, re-engineer, explain, and advocate with a solid grounding in the science and technology behind the topic. In the case of music, it’s now more complex to talk about the impact of playlists when they’re AI-driven than when you could point to something as intuitive as “payola.”

But science? Yeah, you can do genome analysis on your laptop.

And they continue to advance the state of the art in machine learning – even with smaller data sets:

Watch this space

I realize this was a very niche look at this stuff and will cause anyone not familiar with the area to have their eyes glaze over.

But AI + graphics + 3D + collaboration capabilities will pour into more recognizable use cases soon, powered by this tech.

And watch this space for what this might mean for artists, musicians, and creativity using tools like Unreal. Because there is no question in my mind that Unreal and Blender might well be mentioned in the same breath as Ableton Live and a Eurorack rig more frequently in the coming months and years.

But hey, at the very least, maybe tonight you’ll dream about standing on top of a surrealist skyscraper, gazing up at a King Kong-sized graphics card, and shouting at it “when are you shipping? why do these crypto people keep buying you? I just want to play some video games!“

Giant video card is listening. (Cue 2001-style Ligeti soundtrack… aeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee……)

Also, this is super cute – and great to see what young people are doing with this stuff, especially knowing this is a tough time for them and they deserve some fresh opportunities.

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Music via Create Digital Music https://bit.ly/2N55ART April 12, 2021 at 02:48PM