It’s a small (CG) world after all

In my first Substance blog post, I talk about how we built an experimental, or rather educational (for us), build of Painter for the Oculus Rift.

Our 2018 Painter proof of concept on a Rift

Why Oculus you may ask? You would not be the only one. Why Oculus and not, for instance, StarVR, Microsoft, Playstation, Vive, or something else entirely. I am a Steam fan, for example, and have good friends in each of those groups.

As I say in the article, and to be fair, the Oculus team has been a fantastic partner and after our feedback, they reached out to us with just what we needed: a way to get something out there without having to redesign the whole UI, so we can get early feedback and insight, including from artists that may not be our traditional users. That's what we are interested in, when working in Labs, to shape future steps that the product groups may decide to take.

Nothing was announced of course, but it is easy to imagine this working with more platforms, probably in a more mature state.

A story that I did not put in the article but is fun to remember is a bit of an origin story.

 At the same time as the first Oculus test was being presented at GDC 2015 by Jean-François, only a few blocks away, I was becoming good friend with my neighbors, Eric and Jodi. Eric is a veteran in both AAA and Indie games, and he moved to San Francisco to join Kixeye. After a while, we started meeting weekly for drinks and dinner, and we started playing Pandemic Legacy season 1, still one of my all time favorite board games, almost every week. We kept going even after they moved down the peninsula, when Eric joined Facebook, or rather Oculus.

Pandemic Legacy (season 1). Lots of fond memories. We just started Season 2.

A couple of years later I left Pixar, and Eric was also the first friend to visit us when we moved this winter to France. He was at that time starting to brainstorm about how to better increase the reach of Oculus in other fields. So it was not surprising that he was the one, this Summer, who reached out to my team to see if they could make life easier for DCCs.

I love how small the CG world can feel, even with so many people in it. I’m reminded of it every Siggraph. This year I went with my new badge, and met all my friends from MPC, Animal Logic, Pyro Studios, Pixar, Blisscomedia, and it felt like I never left.

Even moving continent, I still feel like I’m part of the same community.