Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Law Of Diminishing Returns: Redux


This post is a revisiting of a previous post from this blog, and is also posted here.

Every so often, the hot topic of crunch/overtime/extra hours comes (read: anytime a jackass like me writes a post about it or the mainstream media decides to interpret what a jackass like me writes as a scathing commentary on the state of the industry). Sometimes, though, high profile people say something about overtime, and it incites a reaction, no matter what the intent.

It’s no surprise to anyone, in any industry, that overtime can creep into all facets of our lives. In the case of me being both a powerlifter and a video game developer, overtime has come in the form of overtraining and crunching, respectively.

Not this kind of crunch, guys

For powerlifters, overtraining generally involves training your body so hard that it effectively cannot recover- your basal body temperature drops, your central nervous system begins to shut down. For game developers, crunching is typically a point in a project that requires developers to work 60, 80, or even 100 hours a week to hit a deadline, pushing our mental capacity to a limit. In both cases, you become lethargic and your sleep suffers, furthering the lack of recovery. The belief for both overtraining and crunch is that that the extra time put in will result in higher quantity and quality of results.

Our ability to cope with such overtime hinges heavily on the amount of time we have to recover from engaging in it.This recovery, whether or active (by, say, deep tissue massage or engaging in an unrelated interest) or passive (by relaxing on the couch or playing video games), can only work if those needing it are given the proper amount of time and resources to ALLOW it to work.

All The King's Horses


Recently, I spent a large amount of time training for a national powerlifting competition. I trained for 5 months, competed in a local meet as a warm up, and then trained for another 2 months before the national meet. During the initial 5 months I worked very hard in the gym and took regular breaks from training so my body could recover, and I saw great gains in strength. At the local meet I set a personal best in the deadlift, and walked away happy.

After the local meet, I took only a few days off, and then decided that I had recovered from the first meet and the stress it had put on my body. Since I had limited time before the national competition, I spent the next 2 months working even harder than I had before. Not only did I not take enough time off after the local meet, I eliminated any down time from my training, effectively giving my body no time to recover. After several weeks of this new training plan, I actually felt weaker. I started skipping workouts and making excuses to myself to not push it too hard. It got to the point where I didn't even want to compete in the national meet anymore. I was burnt out, stressed out, and flat out tired. Even still, I set a goal to break my personal record for total weight. In fact, I planned on pushing myself to move more weight than I had ever done, even during training.

He probably overtrained something...

So what happened? I failed. I didn’t allow my body to recover from the incredible stress I was putting on it, and as a result when it mattered most I couldn’t compete at my full potential. I didn’t reach my goals, and the national meet was one of my worst in recent memory.

All The King's Men


Game devs are probably wondering what this meathead, lunkhead, Planet Fitness-reject's story has to do with them. Well, to paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in “A Time To Kill,” just imagine if what I described above was the progression from a press demo to a final build (or, maybe the progression from shipping a game to working on the next one).

Imagine that the whole team gets behind polishing the absolute hell out of the first hour of gameplay. We spend a good 6 months of time getting the first 3 missions right. The scripting, the code hooks, the character performances, everything. We show it to the press during the months leading up to launch, and all of our attention is focused on that one hour of gameplay shining like a star.

After all of that, the realization sets in that we have 3 months to finish the game. We have to get ALL of that hype into the rest of the missions, the gameplay, the general feel of the game. Maybe this mission here doesn’t have enough of what dude from Kotaku loved, and maybe those animations there don’t live up to the expectations of our publisher. So we start spending extra time revamping, changing, cramming in content. Features creep in. Hours start piling up. Some of us are thinking "I'm working extra hours because I believe in the project," so when we hit a wall at 10pm, we push through it.


We probably looked like MC Hammer on crack at times, too

Suddenly it's Thursday, 2 weeks before submission, and we've already put 50 hours in this week. We start to check in bad data. We break the build. We snap at co-workers. We're no longer being smart or creative about making the game- instead we're going through zombie-like motions to just get it done. We just want to ship this thing and move on to the next project.

And that passion we had? Starting to dwindle, if not gone already.

Sound familiar?

Putting It Back Together


The thing is, though, that it doesn't have to be like this. There can be good overtime. For example, I've overtrained my deadlift and seen incredible gains by pushing myself on heavy days and taking a month away from the next heavy session. I've worked 50-60 hour weeks, with 5 (and rarely 6) days a week for no longer than 2 or 3 weeks to get a deliverable out the door, and have produced work that was higher quality and more rewarding, with no negative effect on my health or marriage.



What made the good overtime better than the bad?

After the bad overtime, I was done. I thought I had recovered enough, so when I tried to (physically and mentally) get back into both activities, I couldn’t. I was done, and wanted out. I considered quitting both powerlifting and game development after the last bad overtime experience with each.


In the case of the good overtime experiences, I was able to take the proper amount of time off that both my body and mind needed to recover not just AFTER the overtime, but DURING it. The work I put during these smaller pushes was of higher quality, more rewarding in the end, and most importantly, kept me engaged in I was doing and looking forward to getting back to it at full tilt as soon as I could.

It can be argued that if we want to be successful, we have to push ourselves harder than the average in our fields. It doesn’t, however, have to have a negative affect on the things we are passionate about. We’ve all read the reports, seen the opinion pieces, heard about EA Spouses and Kaos’ “thousand yard stare.” I’ve read articles on how overtraining has blown out knees, biceps, backs, and worse. Everyone universally agrees that too much overtime is bad- Bad for your health, bad for relationships, bad for studio morale, bad bad bad.

Smell The Roses


Don't let life pass you by
Overtime exists and it’s not going away. I’m not suggesting that it does. I’m not going to rant about crunch time ruining lives. I’m not going to claim that my life has been horribly affected by working overtime or training too hard.

I am, however, going to say this- we all need to manage it better.

I don’t mean that we need to plan better (we know), or avoid feature/exercise creep (we try), or never put in overtime (we will). I mean that we as individuals need to manage how we represent ourselves while working overtime. We need to be conscious of the fact that people who are interested in what we do (powerlifting, game development, insert-your-interest-here) are going to look at us as an example. They’ll see us doing stupid things in the gym or working 100 hours a week, and see us wearing both of those things like honor badges. They’ll see us tweeting about how we’re “crunching to make the game better for you, the consumer!”, or read our Facebook post about how we just totally killed a training session and can’t walk right now- but hey, "no pain no gain!"

Those people will enter our fields and expect that to be the norm, the right way to do things, and they will never question those methods until they too are burnt out. And that’s a damn shame, because we can prevent it. We can teach these newcomers a different lesson- to not make the mistakes that we did. We need to encourage them to come into our industries and change them for the better.

When all is said and done, people will only remember the 4-million-on-day-one sellers, and not the people who worked hard and sacrificed to get the game to that point. We’ll only remember the monster numbers that a powerlifter put up at Worlds, but we’ll never see the training that was put in to achieve that. So let’s take back that part. Let’s do it smarter. Let’s follow the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Technically, It's Creative!


This blog was cross-posted here.

While waiting for a reply to my open letter from a few weeks ago (I still haven’t heard back from you, Andy!), I gave a talk at PAXDev regarding how to animate quickly for design, which contained both creative and technical approaches to game animation. After the talk, I received an email asking two things:

“How do I get into video game animation? I've always found animation to be a very interesting discipline. The problem is that I'm not even sure where to begin training for such a thing.”
And:

“Is animation more technical than artistic, or is it the other way around?”

The first question is something I am asked often, and am glad to help with. I responded to the inquiry with this:

“The first thing to do is learn the basics- read up on the 12 Principles of Animation (read The Illusion of Life- it's the animation holy bible). If you can draw, you could start doing the basic animation tests (bouncing ball, flour sack, etc.) that way w/o needing to buy Max or Maya (though both have 30 day trials!) I've seen far too many beginners jump right in with a walk cycle and not be able to take or understand critique on their work because they don't understand the principles and the vocabulary.

http://www.11secondclub.com/forum/ is a great place to share animation, as well, once you feel comfortable with it. Online schools like http://www.animationmentor.com/ and http://ianimate.net/ are good, but they are not cheap.

Also, watch movies! Watch old WB classics, watch Disney, Pixar, and study the animation. If you see something cool, rewind and step through frame by frame to see what they did. Deconstructing the masters is a great teaching tool.”

However, second part really made me think. Is animation more technical than artistic, or is it the other way around?

The easy answer to this very good question is “yes.” Game animation is both creative AND technical. Animation is creative by nature-we’re figuring out timing of our motions, developing poses that communicate emotion and intent to the player, and ultimately, we’re delivering the look and feel that design wants. In all, we are breathing life into our characters!

Nah, we're just painting pixels, really

However, it helps if you have some proficiency with understanding the technical side of things (though I’m not talking about rigging and other technical animation specialties - those have their own discipline separate from animation). In some engines, your timing in that walk cycle needs to match the timing for the rest of your walk cycles so it blends properly, or your footstep events need to be setup so time-scale blending to your run cycle works properly. In other engines, your poses need to be setup so that they makes sense against other poses they will blend to, unless you want to create countless 3 to 6 frame transition animations.

And you better know what state machines and blendtrees are. If you know how to build them, that’s a big advantage. Know a little scripting? That’s even better.

Oh hey, I can handle that!
This begs the question, however, of where exactly the line drawn is between the two, and how important it is as an animator to BE technically trained. Sure, you can create the best looking run cycle in the history of run cycles, but how does it work with animation layers in-game, how does it transition, and does it hold up to speed changes?

Or does it really matter? Who’s to say that a game animator NEEDS to build those blendtrees? Or that they have to understand how to set up an IK chain in-engine? Or know how the aiming system works?

In my opinion, animators will be far more successful if they have that knowledge.

I don't expect them to have it right off the bat, mind you. Entry level folks should be concentrating on creating good motion and letting their leads dictate the technical details. I also don't think it's a requirement to know scripting or understand how to build a complex state machine in order to be a successful game animator.

SWEET JEBUS THIS IS BEYOND ME HALPS!

However, those animators at any level should be learning WHY those technical details exist. Why a pose needs to be oriented one way or the other, or how their motions will be used in game and why it works that way. They should know what scripting can do for them, at the least so they can request a tool from a tech artist. All the while, continuing to hone the creative side of their craft, in order to become the best game animator possible.

Marrying the creative side of animation with the technical side makes an animator even MORE creative. For example, on a project early in my career, I was tasked with giving the attack animations of a character “more flair.” This was all the direction I was given from my offsite corporate producer. I worked for weeks on just adjusting and presenting the animations with no success. By shear “he was a close friend” luck, I spoke with the VFX artist on the project on how we could push the attack animations further. He told me that I could attach VFX to my animations! I immediately added ridiculously exaggerated spinning weapon movements to the attacks, and worked with that VFX artist to create trails for the weapons. We hooked it up in game, showed it to our producer a week later and he exclaimed “that’s it!” Had I not known about that ability to tie VFX to an animation, I may never have succeeded in bringing my producer’s vision to life.

(at 3:16) More flair, Taurgis, MORE FLAIR! :)

Understanding what happens after your animation is done and makes its way into the game will allow an animator to devise new and interesting ways to make a character move. It also allows them to do it more efficiently, leaving more time for polishing animation or sneaking in that fidget animation that everyone keeps saying they should do.

Understanding both sides also creates the opportunity to be creative with the most tedious, technical animations, like those aforementioned transition animations. Mike Jungbluth does an excellent job discussing how to inject more character into those animations in a separate post. By not treating those animations as a technical requirement and instead as an opportunity to communicate a character’s personality, they become a creative necessity, not a technical one.

Use of motion capture is another opportunity to push beyond the technical. If treated like nothing more than technical data, the motion will stay as it was captured, and the performance delivered will fall short, no matter how good the actor (and we all know my opinion on THAT). Inject the creativity of an animator, and you have the opportunity to punch out poses, adjust timing for bigger impact, and even change shots after the fact. Yes, this opens up the "ownership" debate, but it’s the end result that matters. It’s important to remember that it’s a creative, collaborative effort, and not a technical hurdle that gets in the way of a performance.

Well, usually. :)

In the end, it’s best to approach both the creative and technical sides as wholly creative. The technical side varies from studio to studio, engine to engine, and it's ultimately a teachable process. The creative part comes from you, and you take that to whatever studio you work at and use it in whatever engine you work with.

Monday, August 15, 2011

An Open Letter To Andy Serkis

Dear Mr. Serkis,

If you deserve to be considered for an Academy Award nomination for Acting in regards to your performance motion capture, then every animator who has ever animated a character in any movie deserves consideration as well.

Sincerely,

Tim Borrelli

P.S., Let me clarify:

Recently, you have been quoted as claiming that performance capture actors deserve to be considered for the Academy Awards in Acting categories:


Before I even start, let me say that I feel that you are a great actor. I don’t doubt your acting ability, both on stage and on film. But that’s not the debate here.

From what I gather, here is what you are suggesting. You seem to feel that performances like yours in Lord of the Rings (Gollum), King Kong (King Kong), and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Caesar) should be recognized by The Academy as an individual effort in excellence of acting performance.

Wait. What?

Let’s ignore the fact that animators have been doing this without motion capture longer than you have been suiting up for it.

Performance capture is the digital capture of a performance of an individual actor, to be later applied to a digital character. Yet according to you, “…there are two parts to the process. The first part is capturing the performance. Only later down the line do you start seeing the characters being painted over frame by frame using pixels."

First, that doesn’t sound like an individual performance to me.

Second, painted over? Using pixels? For a guy who has positioned himself to be the spokesperson for performance capture, it sounds like you don't quite understand what goes into the entire process.

Ignoring the fact that there is nothing “being painted over frame by frame using pixels” (almost) anywhere in the process, you seem to be ignorant of what happens to your performance data after you walk off the set. Many times, chunks of data need to be thrown out entirely and done by hand. Also, it is quite often that the actor’s proportions don’t match that of the digital characters, requiring a remapping of the motion. This may not seem like it affects a performance, but it in fact does. Different proportions means poses don’t read the same. It means a slouch on a short actor is a hunchback on a tall character. It means delicate interactions often need to be heavily modified or redone with animation due to differing limb lengths. I could go on.

Long story short, it means the performance is not 1-to-1 from performance capture to screen.

Furthermore, you claim that "Performance-capture technology is really the only way that we could bring these characters to life… It's the way that Gollum was brought to life, and King Kong, and the Na'vi in Avatar and so on and it's really another way of capturing an actor's performance.”

You then go on to say, “That's all it is, digital make-up."

What. The. Hell.

Well, makeup artists HAVE an Oscar category. So are you also suggesting that the people behind taking his performance to the big screen be considered in that category? When you say “that success using the technique can be rewarded with current accolades,” is that what you mean? Should the modelers, animators, painters, shader TDs, lighters, etc., be considered for Makeup and Costume Design?

Makeup and Costume Design teams do amazing work. I just have trouble seeing how modelers, animators, painters, shader TDs, lighters, etc. fit into those categories.

Or are you referring to the VFX category (which, while valid, is a much broader category than acting), or even the lesser known, non-televised technology categories? Are you basically saying that your performance, which wouldn’t even be viewable without those aforementioned teams of people, is more deserving of public recognition?

I, as well as many others, won’t argue that motion capture data is only as good as the actor in the suit. I have directed and worked with motion capture data from actors on both ends of the talent spectrum. I agree that without the proper direction and performance, the end result that I produced wouldn’t be as emotional, as powerful, or as accurate.

However, I also know that without a talented digital character team (animators, modelers, TDs, etc.), that performance will NEVER look as intended.

What you've done here, Mr. Serkis, is downplay the contribution that the whole team makes to bring a character like Gollum to life. What’s worse is that you aren’t alone. In this featurette on the making of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the animation team is completely overlooked!

Is the technology that Weta developed awe-inspiring and exciting? Hell yes it is. I’d love to be on set just for a day and see what the technology is like from start to finish. It would be amazing (and after writing this I may never get the chance). But to see the contribution of an entire discipline glossed over so readily by both a recognizable name (your own, Andy Serkis!) AND a production team is disheartening and frustrating.

Yet, as infuriating as that may be, this is not the point I want to make here. That point is:

If you deserve to be considered for an Academy Award nomination for Acting, then every animator who has ever animated a character in any movie deserves consideration as well.

Animators, both hand-keyed and motion capture artists, breathe life into their characters. They push performances of their characters to an artistic limit, based on the direction they are given. Many even use video reference- animators often of themselves performing (yes, ACTING) the scenes they are working on, mocap artists using video shot on set.

Not to single one person out, but some do it REALLY WELL, like this example (password: education):


Rio Comparison Reel from jeff gabor on Vimeo.

And this one:



It should be clear that this guy is an amazing animator. He’s also a great example of an animator using his own performance to bring characters to life (in the case of Rio, a female lead, and supporting male, and a bird.) As animators, we’ve been taught that video reference is a powerful tool. Like any tool, however, it requires training and practice to get right.

Some things may come more naturally (in a male animator’s case, the supporting male). Some things may take more creativity (like humanizing a creature, such as a bird). Even other things may take a bigger investment into the movement and emotion of the character (the female lead).

However, the end result in Rio didn’t come from just an animator’s performance. It came from the ability to translate that acting into what the digital character warranted.

Like you, Mr. Serkis, animators use their performance to improve and sell the characters they are acting for, in the interest of the whole story.

So my question for you is this:

Don’t animators also deserve individual recognition from the Academy for Acting?

Mr. Serkis, please leave a comment here, or drop me a line. I welcome the discussion, as would many others who do and do not share my opinion.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Designing Animation For Speed

This was cross-posted to AltDevBlogADay. Look for a powerlifting corollary sometime soon!


Everything I ever needed to know about animation, I learned from watching Looney Tunes.

Seriously.

Sure, I went to school. I learned HOW to animate there and from other sources, but none of that taught me what I needed to know about animation as much as watching Bugs outsmart Elmer, Daffy play the second banana, Foghorn Leghorn fumble about, or Wile E. Coyote fall to yet another demise.

Gravity Doesn’t Exist Until You Look Down


Bugs is the popular one. Daffy is the memorable one (Stuuuuuuupor Duck!). Foghorn, well, I say… I say, he was fun to watch with his contraptions. However, Wile E. Coyote is the one that sticks out the most to me.

Not only is it entertaining to watch poor Wile E. try and try again to catch the Roadrunner (with a seemingly unlimited credit line with the Acme corporation), it is also a very good study of how developing a formula can allow an animator to work efficiently while keeping a high quality bar.

Take the timing of Wile E.'s fall, for instance. Did you know that every time he falls, it happens in the same exact number of frames? He tends to walk/fly/float/propel himself over a ledge, and doesn't fall until he looks down (for Wile, gravity doesn't exist until he does this). He then falls over N frames until you see a puff of smoke and hear a distant "splat."

This comedic timing (combined with a happy accident regarding the audio level of his "splat") allowed the Looney Tunes animators to build up to this punchline without worrying if the punchline itself would feel right. It also ensured that re-takes weren't going to be needed- once that formula was set, it was followed.

Set Your Pace

For game animation, I take the same approach, especially for transition animations. In fact, on our current project, we try to animate all transitions to occur on 6, 12, 18 or 24 frames. Each of these frame counts corresponds with the desired perceived pacing of the character's thought process. For example:

"Ready Now!" - 6 frames
"Get moving and STOP!" - 12 frames
"I gotta be ready before I get there" - 18 frames
"OK, I'm gonna pick my spot and get ready when I'm there." - 24 frames

These frame numbers allowed us to build a visual language with these transitions. For example, the faster ones are more immediate and needed for faster gameplay responsiveness (say, for aiming and shooting). Having them all on a 6-frame count holds the player's expectation that if “I've gotta shoot, I'll get there in .2 seconds.” It also allows us to later add interruptible follow-through for an extra 6 or 12 frames without that extra motion feeling out of place.

In contrast, the 18/24 frame transitions typically denote the end of longer, deliberate movement- the player knows they are moving at a certain speed and when they have reached their destination, the transition will carry that speed to a stop. These extra frames allow us to sell the character's weight at that stop, which in turn creates a mental acceptance by the player that it took longer than the 6/12 frame motions.

Fast Iteration



Sweet, sweet consistency
The next benefit to the frame counts is that they are easily scalable from one to the other. Personally, I set poses every 3-6 frames. This lets me easily slide the keys around if I need to make timing adjustments after the animations are implemented. These adjustments can also be easily scriptable (for fast tests), so I can adjust the timing of 160 animations very quickly to see if the new length feels right before going ahead and hand-tweaking them.
Since I've spaced out my keys in a uniform way, I can re-time the motions much more efficiently.
Lastly, these frame formulas give us efficient consistency. Since a uniform length exists, once we nail down the first key animation, we can modify it to create other motions in the same pool. For example, If we need to transition from a non-shooting pose to a shooting pose, we’ll work on a key motion that gets across the character’s intent and the player’s feel. Once design deems the look and feel to be good for gameplay, we can create every other transition in that pool much quicker.

Happy Accidents


Much like the audio level on the splat of Wile E. Coyotes's fall (see the book Chuck Redux), coming up with the multiples of 6 formula was actually a happy accident- the Source Engine's default engine blend value is .2 seconds (6 frames!) In order to not disrupt existing gameplay, we started animating to that frame number. After implementing many transitions, it was apparent that not all of them could or should work on 6 frames. The easiest thing to do was scale the motion by 200% and work back from there. Lo and behold, 200% worked great, so we redid all of those motions with twice the frame count.
Since that pacing looked good, we extrapolated that 18 and 24 frames would be logical to try next. It worked, and now we have a (undocumented till now) visual language for our transitions. We've since extended this philosophy to our movement system, and the animators who work on that pump out high quality motions like nobody's business.

It's Still Creative!


Purist animators out there might be shocked that we take shortcuts in order to produce efficient, high-quality animation at a fast pace. The fact of the matter is Warner Brothers, and even Disney, did the same thing! Read Chuck Redux, or watch this:



The key is to not get so married to those formulas that we are unwilling to change them when they no longer work, or get stale. If that happens, we play with new formulas and do more timing tests until we get it right. In the end, the better we can nail down the punchline, the more time we can spend on the fun part of getting there.


Feedback!


I'd love to hear from other animators and designers what their processes for this are, as well! So speak up, tell your friends to read this and rip me to shreds, tell me how awesome I am or somewhere in between. I'm always looking for different techniques and opinions!

Friday, July 22, 2011

Power Animator

(ed. note: If you’ve made your way here from http://altdevblogaday.com, welcome!)

“There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.” – Booker T. Washington

If there was ever a quote that equally embodies my life as an animator and as a powerlifter, this is it. Aside from the literal translation regarding weightlifting, I feel that this quote also demonstrates how we can excel in our areas of interest by seeking out and nurturing an encouraging an environment of constructive feedback.

For today’s post, I’m going to tell parallel stories based on my experiences as an animator and a powerlifter, and show how opening myself up to external feedback has helped me grow throughout my careers in both.

2005, Champaign, Illinois. My then girlfriend (now wife) Jessica and I were working out at the local Gold's Gym together for the first time. We had been dating for 6 months or so, but until this point, we had different gym memberships. We talked about weightlifting quite a lot (she was an amateur bodybuilder at the time), but we rarely lifted together, and that was about to change.

On that day at Gold's Gym, I was benching and curling, because THAT'S WHAT MEN DO (that's how my mind worked back then). I saw Jessica go over to the Olympic lifting platform and start warming up for squats. I told her, in my all-knowing way, that those would hurt her knees and to be careful. She looked at me with the look that I now know is reserved for idiocy and when the dog poops on the carpet. At the time, I took it for confusion, as though I had just unleashed upon her this knowledge that she was sorely lacking.

She continued on with her squats while I performed my "superior" bench sets. After I was done, I went over to the squat rack to load up a bar. Jessica comes over and asks what I am doing, since "clearly squats are supposed to be bad for your knees!" I reply "I’m gonna do some curls!" I get the same look as before. She stays over on the platform and starts loading up a bar on the ground, and then starts lifting it! I have no idea what she is doing but it MUST be bad for her back, and I tell her as much.

She ignored me. She was deadlifting, and that was serious business for her.

Later on that night Jessica turned to me and asked "So, what are your fitness goals?" I replied "To get bigger and stronger, of course." She proceeded to ask me how I was planning on getting stronger if all I ever did was bench, curl, and use the nautilus machines for my legs. I made some excuse about how I used to squat in college and my knees were all messed up from it.

Then she said it:


This is apparently what I looked like, hair and all.
"You know you have chicken legs, right? You're shaped like a light bulb ready to tip over. And what the hell is with curling in the squat rack? Frat boys do that."

I was disheartened, totally bummed out, but more importantly, I was confused. How could this happen? I spent YEARS in the gym, doing everything anyone ever told me was the right thing to do. I read websites and Men's Health! They HAD to be right!

More importantly, HOW IS A GIRL TELLING ME I AM WRONG ABOUT WEIGHTLIFTING? GAAHH!!

Jessica and I didn't go to the gym together for a few days after that. My ego was a bit... shattered. I wish I could say that I had resources to turn to, but as I looked around, I realized I had none. No books, no expertise to draw on. That's when it hit me- Jessica was my doorway to proper strength training. She knew more about it than anyone I knew, and she could prove her knowledge worked.

Training in a vacuum that way had stunted my growth in a literal sense- I wasn't getting any bigger, faster or stronger. I was living in a viscous cycle of train -> get frustrated -> try something above my strength -> get hurt -> recover -> repeat, and I needed it to end.

That summer, I asked Jessica to design me a program that would improve my strength and help me shed my chicken legs. She did one better and show me how to design that program, reading through books and teaching me different training techniques and calorie intakes. Over that summer I gained 20 pounds, most if not all of which was muscle in my legs. Since then I've gone on to compete in both powerlifting and strongman competitions, and will continue to do so till they have to scrape me off of the platform.

So I guess getting strength training advice from a girl isn’t so bad after all. J

I invite you to read my parallel story about animation on AltDevBlogADay (http://altdevblogaday.com/2011/07/22/power-animator/)


Monday, June 20, 2011

Law of Diminishing Returns

Overtime can creep into all facets of our lives. In the case of me being both a powerlifter and a video game developer, overtime has come in the form of overtraining and crunching, respectively.

For powerlifters, overtraining generally involves training the same muscle group(s) at a higher than normal rate with the expectation that the increased training volume will result in increased strength gains. For game developers, crunching is typically a point in a project that requires developers to work extra hours to reach a milestone, the belief being that that the extra time put in will result in higher quantity and quality of work.

In my experience with both powerlifting and game development, the main factor in overtime having beneficial vs. negative results has been how far away the target result is; i.e., how long you are working overtime, and what you hope to accomplish by doing so. Our ability to cope with such overtime hinges heavily on the amount of time we have to recover from engaging in it. This recovery, whether or active (by, say, deep tissue massage or engaging in an unrelated interest) or passive (by relaxing on the couch or playing video games), can only work if those needing it are given the proper amount of time and resources to ALLOW it to work.

Personally, I’ve experienced both bad and good overtime.

I’ve overtrained my deadlift (by either training too frequently or using too much weight) to the point where I ruptured a disc in my back (multiple times), and I’ve crunched for 100 hours a week, 7 days a week, for 9 months straight (again, multiple times). Each time this occurred, I took a week off. Yes, A WEEK. For training, my ego took over- I felt invincible (and I surely could recover quickly, right?) For game dev, that’s what I was given for my efforts, and so that’s what I took. Plus, I was in a culture that required being present in order to thrive. In both cases, after that first week I went a little lighter on my weights and my hours for a few more weeks, but my true recovery period was only ONE WEEK.

I have also experienced good overtime. I've overtrained my deadlift and seen incredible gains by pushing myself on heavy days and taking a month away from the next heavy session. I've worked 50-60 hour weeks, with 5 (and rarely 6) days a week for no longer than 2 or 3 weeks to get a deliverable out the door, and have produced work that was higher quality and more rewarding, with no negative effect on my health or marriage.

What made the good overtime better than the bad?

After the bad overtime, I was done. I thought I had recovered enough, so when I tried to (physically and mentally) get back into both activities, I couldn’t. I was done, and wanted out. I considered quitting both powerlifting and game development after the last bad overtime experience with each.

In the case of the good overtime experiences, I was able to take the proper amount of time off that both my body and mind needed to recover not just AFTER the overtime, but DURING it. The work I put during these smaller pushes was of higher quality, more rewarding in the end, and most importantly, kept me engaged in I was doing and looking forward to getting back to it at full tilt as soon as I could.

It can be argued that if we want to be successful, we have to push ourselves harder than the average in our fields. It doesn’t, however, have to have a negative affect on the things we are passionate about. We’ve all read the reports, seen the opinion pieces, heard about EA Spouses and Kaos’ “thousand yard stare.” I’ve read articles on how overtraining has blown out knees, biceps, backs, and worse. Everyone universally agrees that too much overtime is bad- Bad for your health, bad for relationships, bad for studio morale, bad bad bad.

Overtime exists and it’s not going away. I’m not suggesting that it does. I’m not going to rant about crunch time ruining lives. I’m not going to claim that my life has been horribly affected by working overtime or training too hard.

I am, however, going to say this- we all need to manage it better.

I don’t mean that we need to plan better (we know), or avoid feature/exercise creep (we try), or never put in overtime (we will). I mean that we as individuals need to manage how we represent ourselves while working overtime. We need to be conscious of the fact that people who are interested in what we do (powerlifting, game development, insert-your-interest-here) are going to look at us as an example. They’ll see us doing stupid things in the gym or working 100 hours a week, and see us wearing both of those things like honor badges. They’ll see us tweeting about how we’re “crunching to make the game better for you, the consumer!”, or read our Facebook post about how we just totally killed a training session and can’t walk right now- but hey, "no pain no gain!"

Those people will enter our fields and expect that to be the norm, the right way to do things, and they will never question those methods until they too are burnt out. And that’s a damn shame, because we can prevent it. We can teach these newcomers a different lesson- to not make the mistakes that we did. We need to encourage them to come into our industries and change them for the better.

When all is said and done, people will only remember the 4-million-on-day-one sellers, and not the people who worked hard and sacrificed to get the game to that point. We’ll only remember the monster numbers that a powerlifter put up at Worlds, but we’ll never see the training that was put in to achieve that. So let’s take back that part. Let’s do it smarter. Let’s follow the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Looking Back To Forge Ahead

It's been a while since I've written anything. I've had a few ideas kicking around that I am still working on, but overall I haven't been happy enough with any of them to post them.

One reason for this is that I have been in a bit of a funk lately, from a creativity standpoint. I kind of lost my mojo, as it were, and have been working on getting it back. Writers call it writer's block, I don't know what the hell animators call it, but I have it. I can point to a few external factors that have been contributing to my overall funk, and I know they'll pass.

This week was going particularly bad, and tonight was meant to be a mindless, woo-sah, clear everything from my mind night. My wife went out with a girlfriend, I ordered pizza and watched random crap on TV. Recipe for success, right? Wrong. None of it was working.

Then I stumbled across a few things that I had written in the past that put my current funk into perspective. Some were recent, some were ancient. The recent ones reaffirmed decisions that I made last summer, and reminded me that my wife and I are in a better place.

But reading those still didn't shake my funk.

The ancient ones, however, are helping. They are Developer Diaries I wrote for IGN 11 years ago. They are poorly written, and I just sound young with my words. However, I saw something else there- A passion for what I was doing. A somewhat intelligent ability to break down my animation processes (and caffeine habits). A desire to attack any challenge head on and do the best I can. No, better than that.

There were also REALLY BAD stick figure drawings.

My point here is that we all get stuck in a rut creatively. It sucks. While we need to constantly push forward with our craft, every so often it doesn't hurt to look back to where we came from. Sometimes, that older version of you might have something to teach the current you.

Oh, and in case anyone is morbidly curious, here are the links to the Dev Diaries:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/075/075980p1.html
http://pc.ign.com/articles/080/080913p1.html

Enjoy.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

AltStyle によって変換されたページ (->オリジナル) /