Anyone ever-
polycounter lvl 17
-lose multiple weekends cleaning up after a former teammate who's work was a sloppy mess? Fuck lazy egotistical assholes who lack enough integrity to do their work right the first time, then shove off leaving extra work for their team. End micro rant. thank you, drive through.
Replies
as in, someone produces a complete load of shite and sods off home, but return to work to find it all shiny and working and as if nothing bad had ever occurred. And who magically turned the crap around? Arse Elves. That's who. No-one likes it when Arse Elves have to step in. In fact it makes people really very angry
actually, they've been very quiet of late - there was a council, and it was decided that no work would be ever be redone by Arse Elves any more. Do it your fucking self.
Its pretty sad this is so common and even sadder that it often happens for Lead/Director work.
Best thing to do, I've found, is ask the opinions of your other teammates to get their thoughts- if your AD is a good guy, make sure he knows. If he is the cause of your problems, you really need to get other people on your side and present your case to him and his bosses.
This sort of thing is not at all unique to game development, cleaning up after others, it occurs in every job from the factory to the cubicle. Some of it is inevitable, but people need to be secure enough about their jobs and importance, not just to speak up for themselves, but to speak up in defense of their peers who get shitted on.
good thing is now im fortunate to work with a bunch of pro artists
The worst instances I've seen are when good people take it upon themselves to clean up after those not doing their jobs properly, without making it known to the right parties.
All they do is overload themselves covering for someone else's errors. It's not always a sinister situation involving an incompetent employee either, there could just be a kink in the production pipeline. Just another situation of the squeaky wheel getting the grease I guess. If you don't speak up and let the right people know, nothing will change.
Other times it's just an unavoidable hurdle in the project you're working on, which sucks like a Hoover. I once spent 9-10 months going back over existing characters and props adding and dev-kit testing normal and spec maps. That was less than fun to say the least...
I can imagine though that I might be annoyed if I had my own deadlines, and then also got the extra work of doing other people's work as well.
I was also in this weekend prepping assets to get sent out to one of our outsourcing vendors to go and make a bunch of small changes to a large number of items. Wouldn't have had to do that if there was enough planning put in and accountability for the areas they were responsible for.
Different aspects, similar frustrations.
Just make sure to be vocal, but not at an asshole, about it. Because you can be damn sure the 80% is vocal or they wouldn't be there.
what is the worst is when you cleaned everything up and fixed shit like crazy and optimized everything and polished it to a solid shine ...
and than the people figured out something is wrong this looks marginal different from what i did and than the revert to the broken version without talking to anyone one day before submission.
For instance, some gray painted brick that I was looking at had a base white color, then a brick overlay, then a grime multiply, then a hard light overlay, then a color layer, then a color adjustment layer, then a levels adjustment layer, then a screen overlay.
On top of that, there were two elements of gray brick on the texture. But were they on the same layers, and did they share the same convoluted combination of color, multiply, and adjustment layers? NO! The each had their own set of chaotic layerings.
It was just fucking gray painted brick that needed to be darker and collor corrected slightly. Just collapse your shit to maybe a base and a single overlay so that I can color corrected or make quick changes easily. Do not just keep adding unnamed layers willy nilly for minor adjustments. Collapse them.
With the amount of work that goes into creating spec and normal maps now days, there's a lot of psd work and organization that should be happening. Assume that your psds will be touched by someone else. If you don't want them to hate working with you, for god's sakes at least organize them somewhat, and have some rhyme and reason to whatever it is that you are doing.
Ouch! How do people operate like this? I do 4 folders for masks, diffuse, spec , and normal colored for easy of reading when uncolapsed and then use subfolders as well. For speed I have names and colors hotkeyed on my g15.
When freelancing, I once had to deal with a PSD made by someone else, which was 250 unnamed layers. The PSD was 1024x1024, and slowed Photoshop to a crawl (something which had never happened before), and the file size was about 200mb.
It was basically unworkable, so I spent about 2 hours figuring out what the hell was going on with it (turned out some layers just contained a single brush stroke, then a layer on top contained a counter-stroke to override the stroke below it... ever heard of "Delete Layer"?!), and then collapsed it down as much as I could - ended up as a 20-layer PSD which was 15mb, and ran perfectly smoothly in PS, and was actually capable of being edited in a sane fashion!
I have no idea how some people can make PSDs like that, it's basically just shooting yourself in the foot... you slow down your own work, artificially bloat file sizes, and make life hell for whoever has to edit it.
I've seen 3D scene files suffering from the same thing... hundreds of objects called "cube01" or "cylinder99", not in any layers or groups, hardly any instancing when it could be used all over the place... gah. How do people actually get work done in this way?
In ps, lets say, i mostly just paint . And using the same layer work for me, of course Iam not perfect, so I copy that layer over n over to secure my happy stroke. Ahaha,
but uh. sometimes client will require the psd, or I know Ill need to use that texture again, I make the Clean file, Base layer, Wireframe, alpha, and groups for different shit. I guess its a matter of experience and shit like that. Cause maybe ya like to work in URmess, but other might not, and a Clean file, is a timesaver when u have to go back, or fix shit.
Same with Max. Except layer, Dont like then much.
ben
For normal/diffuse/spec etc it gets a lot more complicated, I usually have about 10-20 layers in each layer group, sometimes more depending on how many materials the object is made out of. I'd never have a PSD with just a single layer unless it was really simple, that's just too inflexible. I don't really see the point of duplicating layers, that's what version history is for.
EACH HIS OWN!
better!?I WAS CLOSE!
edit: I was right! Happypartytime!
Yea, I've run into a few people who like to dump and run. Our end of game peer review period makes sure they get their come-uppins. It isn't anonymous so what people say isn't anything that hasn't already been said. It normally gets used as a tool of praise then a rough back hand. Most of us here like to deliver those in person...
Most people here bend over backwards to make things clear and clean, but every once in a while someone gets sloppy and it costs someone else some time. And by someone else I mean me. I sit at the end of the production chain so I get to fix or kick back all the little/big f-ups that get made.
You're 11 and work in a studio? hurray for child labor.