Cleaning Up

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 10:40 PM

On Monday I returned from a long weekend trip to be greeted with a wonderful landlord-sponsored repainting of our bathroom. It was long overdue and a huge relief to have it finally done. In a strange bit of synchronicity all last week I was looking for quote, which I still have not found. I think it was from Thoreau and had something to do with how after applying a fresh coat of paint, the first thing he noticed in the corner of the room was a spider. To my surprise, when I looked closely, there was a spider in the corner of the bathroom.

I was thinking about this as I was watching my kids play last weekend. We spent the morning cleaning the living room, just organizing all the toys mostly. Before I could even finish, they started pulling out other toys, very excited by the new white space in the play area. It got me thinking about how this site, and especially the forums, have been long overdue for a bit of cleaning. I have for the last six months or so tried many times to get back into working here and have turned away feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of even just making sense of what needs to be done. I have also seen other artists take the first steps towards wanting to help out with our goals and have seen them turn away as well, not knowing where, when, or how they could help. I know that the biggest way to help get things rolling is for me to be constantly engaged and involved, but I also know that I cannot always make that commitment. So, the first step I am taking is to make things a lot simpler. Last night, I went through the forums and did some major reorganizing. My hope is that simplifying makes it easier for any of you to find the information you are looking for and will provide a more open and inviting framework for participating. If nothing else, it's more inviting to me personally and will make it easier for me to stay engaged with the forums. Stop by the forums and let me know what you think.

Oh, and, hey! Happy Birthday to us! We've now been on this project for 4 years. We have not done anything new the past year or so, but the site remains live, the files remain available for download, and another few thousand students, artists, and indie game developers have benefitted from our work. I look forward with optimism towards being able to continue in our quest to provide great free artwork for you all, both here as a community project and on my other site as a solo project.

Stay free
~shs~

Mirror, Mirror

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 1:03 PM

Last time I touched briefly on the fact that I've recently started up a new project. Much of the reason for its existence is to provide a place for me to experiment and talk about things beyond the scope of the coop's community mission. I'll be getting more into that later, but for now I just wanted to talk a little about one of the aspects of the new site I have been creating. Last summer when the lowpolycoop site phased out of existence for a couple weeks (it was a dns server issue -- we were still actually here the whole time), I finally admitted to myself that something as valuable to the community as this site is needs some sort of backup in case it ever goes away again. Although we have not done much in the way of new work this year, the site still gets a few hundred visitors per day, dozens of downloads, and links to our tutorials and files are featured in the wikis for a number of very-well travelled open source projects. There is definitely a need for the continuance and permanence of the work we have all done, and one of the best ways to achieve that is to spread the load and responsibility of carrying the torch amongst more than one central location. In creating my new site, I wanted to include as part of its foundation a way to mirror and backup the content that you get here.

Once I got into creating the download area on my new site, I was pleasantly surprised that, in selecting wordpress as the platform for publishing new articles, I now had on my hands a much more flexible and easy to maintain system for listing all of the downloads than I have here. I can easily now put more detail about the downloads and include images. Instead of just serving as a backup, it is turning out to have better potential as a way to communicate about our files. So, I am actually going to include a link here to this new download page. There is still much for me to enter to fill out the page, but as a way of launching the creation of the downloads page, I have put up a new WIP file for you all to download, the Ohlone Urban Park pack. It is a bunch of new-old stuff from last year that is the kernel of what will eventually be the follow-up to the Gilman pack of models -- there are even a couple of complete and textured models in there to go along with the numerous WIP files. I'll be posting the stuff I mentioned in the last post in the next few weeks -- I wanted to get the foundations built first. Enjoy!




This also brings me to something else I wanted to discuss. The biggest bottleneck in the whole process of distributing models through this project has been in the organization, exporting, and deployment of new files. This, along with just a general lack of time, has been the biggest part of the process that has caused me to delay releasing new material this year. Whenever I have said "A lot of work has been going on behind the scenes", it is has been a roundabout way of saying that collecting and distributing any new material has become such a drain on our meager amounts of time, that it comes last. As part of the effort to flow work to you all on a more regular basis, I am cutting out some of the work I do on the file wrangling. From this point forward, I will be distributing fewer file formats in the downloads. For WIP files, the downloads will include a Blender file and maybe a texture file. For complete models, I will be including the Blender file, an .obj file, and a flattened texture file in .png format at the size it was created (most often 1024 x 1024). This places more of the responsibility on you to convert the file to the format you need for your development pipeline, but I have found over the past three years that people are using such a wide variety of tools with our files that there is no way we can deliver something that will work for everyone. If you need to you could always download Blender and use it as a conversion tool if nothing else. I'm just trying to keep things as simple as possible and keep the people on our team doing what we do best -- making art.

Try out my new detailed download page. If anyone else wants to volunteer to mirror our files, let me know.

Stay free

~shs~

Happy (Re)birthday

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 1:47 PM

Yes, it has been very quiet around here, silent even. Our third birthday passed this summer with no fanfare and nary a peep from us artists out back in the workshop. I like to think of it as a time of dormancy -- a well needed rest for those of us guiding the action around here. For me, the biggest draw away from doing new work for the coop has been family, particularly our third child (who is now over 2 years old) and most recently an illness that required a lot of attention and travel. Add on top of that the flagging economy here in the US and a fair amount of scrambling to react to it on the part of the leaders at my day job and you have an accounting of how my priorities have shifted this year. This is not to say, though, that this project is dead -- far from it. Even while we have not released anything new, and while we even had a worrisome period of site downtime, the site still draws a consistent stream of visitors. Our Gilman pack of models is still downloaded a few hundred times a month and we have well over 10,000 downloads of it in the past year and a half. There is still a hum going on around here even without new stuff to show.

Well, it is time to change that. The batteries are charged. I'm ready to get things rolling again. It'll be slow at first. There is still a month left in my crunch time at work. I've also started a new free model project with a slightly different bent (more on that later), but once it gets rolling I will be able to flow the work from there into here also. For now, though, just to get kick-started again, I am going to pull out an incomplete piece I have and re-purpose it for here. Below is a screenshot of a piece I was intending for my portfolio, but which I have since abandoned, mostly because I need to move on to next-gen techniques for my portfolio work. For the Low Poly Coop, though, it should work quite well. So, I am going to start splitting the scene up into separate models and make them available for all of you readers out there. I hope it proves to be of some use to you all.



Also, over the next few weeks, I will be updating all of our download files. There are many, many files that are works-in-progress that I have never posted here on the main blog. I will probably be simplifying the way I deploy these files, mostly to make it easier for me to get them out on a timely basis, but still in a way that allows for adequate accessibility So, look for that in the coming weeks and months.

Stay Free
~shs~

Help You, Help Me

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 5:57 PM

Help Yourself
I have an interesting story to tell you, something that really surprised me. Last night I was at the grocery store, and, being in my usual I-have-three-kids-and-I-am-tired-and-in-a-hurry state of mind, I rammed my cart into a display of plastic juice bottles. For a moment I thought I was fine, then at the opposite end of the display 2 cartons, about 30 bottles, rolled off onto the floor. My first thought, being a parent, was "Oh man, now I have to pick this up." But then I thought, "Wait, when you spill things at a store or restaurant, someone who works there will come around and pick it up." As I glanced around quickly to see if someone was going to do that very thing, I realized that was just irresponsible, the bottles did not break or anything, so I just started to pick them up. Then a most unexpected thing happened, though. About ten other people bent over and picked them up with me, finishing off the task in about a minute. I imagine that if I just stood there looking helpless or tried to ignore it that the most I would have gotten would have been a few nasty stares. Instead I got a real world example of something I see time and time again on game development message boards. People are much more willing to help people who take the effort to help themselves first.

How many times have you seen it over at gamedev or garagegames? Someone new to the community plainly says "I want to make the next great MMORPG, I don't know what to do, help me!" The charitable responses are usually of the following types: "Read the stickies"; "Search the forum/web/google"; "Can you be more specific?". more commonly, these messages are ignored. At the worst, it turns into a festival of flaming -- no need to describe this in detail, you've all seen it. Now, think about a new person who says "I read this, I searched there, I get it mostly, but I am missing one important thing". That person will get a good response. Sometimes four or five people will post immediate and useful information. Approaching a call for help from a position that one is competent, resourceful and thoughtful yields far more help than someone who appears needy, lazy and careless.

This is a great reminder to something we all may already know, an extension to the golden rule. Help yourself first and others will be more likely to help you.

Helping Others Helps You
It is quite simple to look at the work we do here in the coop, the work of giving art away, as an act of altruism. That the very act of making our art free is the same as making it worth nothing. I feel strongly in the contrary. Yes, offering help to others, in our case by offering game art to indie developers, does give me that warm fuzzy glow that comes from receiving admiration and respect from those I respect and admire. But, it's more than that. I do receive personal gain from what I do here. By fostering the community that I believe in passionately I am making that community a little bit stronger with each little bit I put into it. My hope is that this indie game dev community can grow large enough and strong enough that it can support a bunch of little indie game artists like me and my friends. Basically I am helping make an industry that can hopefully one day contain my dream job.

Here, I have a story for you that may illustrate this. About six years ago, I started up a site to sell self-published comics, similar to the kind that my friends and I used to publish back in the early nineties. After about six months, it was doing reasonably well with great potential for growth. Eventually I shut it down due to demands from having a second, and then later, a third, child. At the same time, a friend I met through this community, Rick Bradford, was turning his comics news and reviews blog into a store as well. At the time, there was not a huge market or customer base for selling these types of hand made books on an ecommerce site. But now he is doing well enough, between his store and a number of similar endeavors, to be working on comics full time. This is fantastic. 15 years ago, when we both started loving these types of comics, there was only a small, or at best, decentralized market for the work and selling something on a computer was barley even thought of. Many years of a handful of people like this nurturing the community out of sheer love of the medium has brought us to a time when those who love something the most can work on it as much as they want.

In short, reminder number two is this. Helping others helps you, too.

Help Us
Before I finish I do want to say that, yes, there is a goal to this post. I am here to ask something I don't often ask, and something I have not asked for in any kind of a concerted fashion before. In short, I am asking you to help us. Come join the coop. We learn, we share, we create together and, more than most virtual teams, we get stuff done. I have been extremely lucky to work with the great artists who have stopped in and contributed and I would like to share that with any of you who want to join in. Now is a great time to jump in. We're ramping up after a hiatus. We're building new teams. We've been working on new stuff and we're ready to have new artists join in. If you would like to know more, then check out our new Beginner's Guide to Joining, join the forums and do some work.

And, if you don't want to join a group like ours, that's fine, go ahead and give it a try on your own. Do something to contribute to the community -- it will help all of us and it will help you.

Stay free
~shs~

Thousander Club Update -- September 10, 2007

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 11:29 AM

Getting back into the regular habit of posting these updates. I'll get some screenshots up this week -- we're getting busy in the forums.

GBGames' current year hours (8/6) -- 146
GBGames' total hours (8/6) -- 409.25
Scott's current year hours (9/10) -- 137.5
Scott's total hours (9/10) -- 410.5
Scott's 1000 biking miles (9/3) -- 488

Stay free.

~shs~

Thousander Club Update -- September 5, 2007

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 5:03 PM

I am slowly creeping back towards being more regular in the hours I devote to working on art. From my experience last year the best solution to getting work has been to be consistent. A little bit of work everyday has yielded far greater results for me that doing work in sprints. The bicycling is coming along very well. At my current rate of biking to work every work day, I will be able to miss about 10 days and still make it. I hope the rain holds off until the usual time of February and March for the Bay Area! Gianfranco recently moved, so his reporting is out of date, but he has finally moved ahead of me and is probably now WAY ahead of me -- even after starting three months later than me last year. I'm looking forward to crsossing the half way point.

GBGames' current year hours (8/6) -- 146
GBGames' total hours (8/6) -- 409.25
Scott's current year hours (9/3) -- 133.5
Scott's total hours (9/3 -- 406.5
Scott's 1000 biking miles (9/3) -- 464

Stay free.

~shs~

How Long Does it Take Anyways?

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 1:24 PM

I've been thinking about time recently. Partially, it is natural -- time plays a big part in my day job. I keep projects on deadline and I estimate how long projects should take. That sort of thing. But I've taken a much greater interest in understanding how all the little grains of time add up over the day, how all the little bits of sand become the massive waves of dunes. I think what sparked my renewed passion in this myopic accounting of seconds and minutes is a project I worked on recently. There was this certain task that had to be done on a regular basis, a fairly mindless task but it needed to be done with enough concentration so as to avoid stupid mistakes. Basically it amounted to an hour of design work and five hours of copying and renaming files. Naturally my mind started to wander and I started calculating how long each keystroke, each renaming, each click was taking. I ended up figuring out a solution that cuts out over four hours from the process and that sort of success has gotten me to start thinking about how long tasks in other parts of my life take.

I've been reading with interest a discussion being had over at the Freegamer blog and related forums about making a centralized project for the creation of a library of free game art -- kind of like what we do here, but multiplied by n. I would love to see something like that take off. There has always been a tough balance to strike around here with our project. We want our project and our team to grow because with growth comes excitement, momentum, and a sense of doing something greater than ourselves. But, there is also the urge to keep it small, because with smallness comes friendships, independence, and a sense of working on something as close to our passions as we can get in public. I've probably said it a thousand times in this space, but I'll say it again. There is a point at which there will be enough free game art in this community that a developer could get a long way towards reaching the first goal in creating a whole game -- a kind of critical mass if you will. I've always gone for a thousand as an even number. A thousand generic environment models plus one great developer plus one great artist to create custom artwork can put together a valid demo/beta/prototype. And if someone else out there is going to help lead a community effort to bring it all together, then, well... yeehaww! Go to it!

Which brings me here. I got to thinking about these things together -- time accounting and a large community effort. So, I am going to throw numbers at you. Yes, even in some detail. I hope I don't lose many of you, because I often get bored when people start spewing numbers, but I do think there is some sort of point at the end of this, my thoughts on how something larger than we have here now could possibly be run. It might make sense to apply some of this thinking to our own projects here, even. Up to this point our group, and our output has grown and changed very organically over time. For any artist coming along offering help, my one main direction has always been, "Just start working on stuff". This works great for a while, but without my constant attention, the organic growth tends towards being fallow. It is something akin to a gardener standing in the garden with a hose, watering the seedlings and saying out loud, "Grow". Things do grow and in some quite extraordinary ways. But as the team matures and the list of projects grows and production of art goes in all sorts of wild directions, it does get out of control. Sometimes this is good -- projects like this attract the type of people who inspire and create beautiful art. Sometimes it is not -- projects like this tend to drive away hardworking and productive people who would keep projects on track and spirits high as everyone sees the results of all their work coming together. Any project massive enough to say it can organize one community (artists eager to donate art) and supply another (developers looking for quality free art) needs to think about how teams need to be structured and a big part of understanding team structure is understanding how things get done, who does those things, and how long these things actually take to get done. And I am going to talk a little bit about what I have learned over the past two years, working with a flexible team of 20 artists, supplying models to over 5000 developers, wrangling over 200 models and helping the flow of over 500 man-hours.

So, here come the numbers.

I looked at the Gilman Street project that we completed last year. It was in many ways the easiest to examine since I was involved with all steps of the process and did about 50% of the work myself on it. So, accounting for time was a matter of looking over my Thousander Club records and extrapolating other artists' time based on forum postings. Here are some basic numbers:

42 complete models
320 total man-hours

Given that I edited out a few at the end, I am going to go with a rough number for the following:

7 hours per complete model

How does that break down?

1.5 hours -- Modelling and unwrapping
3 hours -- Texturing
1 hour -- Exporting and file wrangling
1.5 hours -- Man. & Misc., includes project management, team communication, finding source material, recruiting, anything else miscellaneous.

I've broken it out this way to coincide with each of the discreet steps at which files can be passed from one team member to another in a manner that feels complete. It also works out that each handoff point matches pretty well with standard skillsets of modeller, texture artist, technical artist, and management.

My next step is to then apply this accounting to formulating a proposal for what would be an ideal team structure for creating a massive library of models. At some point I may actually finish an article I have been exploring for the past year about Brooks' Law and how it applies to the sort of virtual game art teams similar to this coop. For now, in short, my conclusion is that small teams are best for creating work in the way that we have done here in the coop. My calculations say that anything over seven team members working on any one project starts to produce a state in which each person added makes the team less productive. Five may actually be a more ideal number, but given that real life has a way of knocking people out (see my last ten posts), I say seven would be a better starting point.

So, let's try this out for size. Let's make a project team that consists of the following members:
2 Modellers for modelling and unwrapping
3 Texture Artists for texturing
1 Technical Artist for exporting and delivery of files
1 Team Facilitator to handle all the team management
1 Floater to help the team facilitator and to fill in the gaps on the team

How does that sound? What does this team accomplish? Well, if each person on the team works five hours a week, that will net a content pack with 50 models in a period of 10 weeks. If each person works 2-3 hours per week on the project, a content pack will be done in under 6 months.

For a team like ours, if we get larger than we have been, it might or might not make sense to split out in teams like this. For the Gilman project, which tooks 18 months to complete, I filled more than one of these roles. I was, in effect, 1 modeller, 1 texture artist, the technical artist, the team facilitator, and the floater. Maybe for a team like ours, which is small by its very nature, this sort of flexibility is better suited to us than grafting on a layer of structure. For contemplating a massive project like a community media project, though, with potentially thousands of elements, I think it makes a lot of sense. Expecting a crowd of people, each one an artist with a unique style and a partial skillset, to just drop off whatever they have made in their spare time with little oversight is an invitation to chaos. At best, with the efforts of a few dedicated facilitators, the mass of work can be wrangled into some sort of coherency. But, having been one of these central faciliators in the past (a whole separate story), I know that the sort of effort needed to rein it all in is taxing, unappreciated, and is often met with resistance and spin. In short, it is not a position to stay in for long and any lapse in the continuity of the main facilitators' presence results in a strong blow to the project.

I propose, either for project like a large community media project or for the coop if we grow that large, that an approach of creating multiple small teams brings the best of both worlds. The team dynamic can help create work that is better than the work that any one person can accomplish, yet a small team is ideal for creating work that is cohesive and focussed.

I say we all throw a party when we reach a milestone of 1000 original models for the community!

Stay free
~shs~