Intricacies of Creating 3D Content for Non-Gaming Brands

Technical artist August Wasilowski, also known as Mayor Awesome, has joined us to talk about the differences between working with non-gaming brands and partnering with game developers.

I wrote my first program in 1987. It was a Dungeons and Dragons character sheet generator for the Apple II Plus. I've called myself a programmer ever since then. I was a traditional web programmer and did a lot of websites and .NET programming up until about 2012 when virtual reality became a thing. The Oculus Rift DK1 came out on Kickstarter, and from there, I moved to video games. I was working for a company called InContext Solutions, a consumer market research company. It's amazing how much retailers and brands will spend on just doing research and trying to get as much data as they can into the mindset of the consumer.

When VR came along, we were making virtual stores you could walk through. We could send you on a shopping mission and figure out what you like to do and we did it in a web browser in a video game. We started doing lots of experiments with user interfaces, but eventually, we were able to port our market research into the virtual reality realm. It was very interesting, cool, and fun. I was able to help the company with one of its rounds of investment from Intel Capital. I also got a patent for VR in a retail simulation. 

I helped build a startup company called Live CGI at that time, but it doesn't exist anymore. We were doing virtual TV studios in Unreal Engine so you could shoot someone in front of a green screen, plop them into your virtual set, and do a whole TV show. We started that around 2018, and in 2020 when the pandemic hit we were doing remote video broadcasts.

Then we started working with the National Basketball Association. They have a video game called NBA 2K League; it's a basketball video game, but they also have a competitive esports tournament wrapped around this video game and professional teams. During the pandemic, they were all living together in the same home so they could practice together. They had a TV show and a studio that they couldn't access all of a sudden. They had obligations, they still had to put out content on ESPN, TV, the internet, Twitch, and YouTube. So they contacted us and we were able to migrate their broadcast to the remote scene where you have "talking heads" in front of their webcams.

Working with Non-Gaming Brands

With Live CGI, we did a lot of awards shows, including the 2020 Esports Awards. It was all virtual in Unreal Engine. They shot the whole show in front of a green screen and then sent us the footage, and we had two days to turn it around, to take their video footage and render it in Unreal Engine with our priority camera moves. And yeah, that was an interesting show.  

We also did the Time magazine's Top 100 Awesome People show. We also worked on the Latino Cinema Awards and some things for Jewelry TV, a shopping network. They couldn't get into their TV studio, so we would give them a virtual one.

For InContext, we worked with Walmart, Coca Cola, and Intel. After that, I worked for Level Ex, a medical game company.

3D Content for Big Companies

First of all, big companies want 3D content to simulate virtual environments to do research. Companies like Level Ex mostly use video games to simulate medical procedures to help salespeople sell medication and medical equipment. We made a lot of pharmaceutical video games, like where you click a pill many times to break it, get points, and it tells you what the drugs do. We also made an application that teaches you how to apply a tourniquet and sent it to Ukraine, and it got deployed into the field to soldiers on the front lines.

Also, one of the biggest product use cases we had in InContext Solutions was building presentations for internal sales, policy- or decision-making.

Game Developers VS Non-Gaming Brands

From the sales side, non-gaming brands and game developers have different audiences. In traditional video games, you imagine a 12-year-old kid or something like that if you make Fortnite games, that's your target audience, flashy and cool. Non-gaming clients are usually interested in reality, simulation, and objectivity. The pace of the video game is going to be different. 9 times out of 10, you just want a fancy slideshow. The game mechanics are different.

If you're working on non-gaming applications, the pace of development can be slower. It can be more organized and drawn out, and you work with Agile methodology a lot more than you do with video games. 

I have a feeling that in traditional video games, you'd be using the Waterfall methodology, meaning things evolve over time, but at the end of the day, everything is going to coalesce and become a video game. Corporations love the Agile "dogma", they love measurement, they want to measure your velocity over time, etc.; they need visibility. So game development is less about one big feature and more about iterating and incrementally improving your product over time according to the needs of the highest-paying client.

In traditional games, you have a vision, you have your game design document, you have everything fleshed out, you've got your story: "Okay, we're going to do this for the images and we're going to need these animations, we need these set pieces." Then you go build it, and it's done when it's done. 

August Wasilowski, Technical Artist