Produced By - #25 - Jad Deeb: Technical Artist Perfecting His Craft from Virtual Production to Gaming

Starting point is 00:00:03 Jet Deep is a real-time technical artist and programmer with a strong knowledge of Anuriel Engine and Houdini, currently working as a senior technical artist at London-based gaming studio of Homeda Studios. Born in Lebanon, Jet moved to London a few years ago looking for a better life and opportunities after his native country began experiencing a crisis. It allowed him to pursue his passion for gaming and he enrolled in a foundation course in graphic design, design, rolled by a bachelor's in 3D games and animation. Outside of school, JET was active in developing his artistic skills and started working as a freelancer, which helped him to build up a solid portfolio of work to be able to enter the industry

Starting point is 00:00:46 before finishing university. JET took an active role in honing his artistic skills outside of the classroom and began working as a freelancer, which enabled him to establish a strong body of work and open doors to the industry before graduated. Starting in a virtual production, Jet begins by introducing us to this industry, sharing specific on what it's like to work there, and discussing some of the projects he worked on. He later relocated to the gaming industry where he is currently employed, developing games and supporting other artists. Listen to this episode to get an introduction to virtual production and gaming, receive some helpful tips from a seasoned artist, and discover more about gaming

Starting point is 00:01:27 for PCs and consoles in general. Enjoy. Hello, Jet. Thank you for journey to us today and welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, man. Appreciate you. Can you please try to introduce yourself? Yeah, of course.

Starting point is 00:01:44 So like, hi there. I'm Jed, currently senior technical artist that owe me the studios. I also have my own company where I do freelance, currently working on Unknown Nine with Swab for Reflector Entertainment. And yeah, I've been jumping in and out for a while now, started my career more graphic designy character art,

Starting point is 00:02:00 jumped into tech art, started full-time around like four or five years ago-ish. I worked on a bunch of virtual production stuff. So like BBC sports sets, Volvo, AR stuff. And from there, jumped into the games industry. So I've worked on Asia Vampires 4. I've worked on a Project Whistler, which is a Sony Inclusive. That's unfortunately not going to see daylight. Look, I'm just a long story about like different publishing stuff with a different studio, basically.

Starting point is 00:02:30 So it's never going to... Never going to see Light. No, no. One of the coolest projects I've ever worked on, not going to lie. But yeah, it got axed. So that happened. And now probably working out predecessor in Unknown Nine, which are like really solid, really cool games. So yeah, this is me in a nutshell.

Starting point is 00:02:49 Sounds like exciting career. Can we start maybe with your background? Can you tell us where we are from and how you started in the first place? Yeah, for sure. So I'm from Lebanon originally. I lived there my entire life, grew there at uni stages. I used to have a phone business, believe it or not. But like the economy crumbled in Lebanon, so kind of needed to get out in one way or another.

Starting point is 00:03:15 So what is it? Phone business? We're like selling phones, wholesale literally. So like, we would go on like a motorcycle with a bag of phones. And then we would go through phone stores and like see if they want this. like buy your phones in bulk and wholesale. It was a blast. It was really fun.

Starting point is 00:03:34 But it's quite a carrier change. Yes, yes, it is. Like when, again, the economy collapsed in Lebanon. So either I wanted to like keep working for like a lot less money or I would just go over something else. I was already kind of into computers, graphic design and whatnot and have done a lot of graphic design gigs. And I thought, you know what?

Starting point is 00:03:57 Why not? Let me get into 3D. more and like bring it down. And how many years ago was it when economy collapsed there? Around six, seven years ago, is when everything started like going haywire. And when it became somewhat serious, give or take, I just decided to come to the UK, like go through university course and then start working and get it rolling. And if you don't mind, can you briefly discuss what is it like to live in Lebanon?

Starting point is 00:04:26 I think you are actually the first person I met from that country. So why was it actually that the economy collapsed? Was it because of government? Yeah, yeah, I would say so. Like Lebanon is a beautiful place. It's just a gorgeous place to be in, the people, the vibes. Like in Europe, it's mostly everyone for themselves. And then you meet in a pub and whatnot.

Starting point is 00:04:48 In Lebanon, it's more like everyone still. You can just go speak up to everyone on the road and make friends, which is like the beauty about like, Lebanon having fun and stuff. And I grew up there, so of course, I'm going to, like, be more complimentary towards Lebanon. Were you from Beirut? Is it capital? Beirut is the capital.

Starting point is 00:05:07 That's where, like, the big blast happened a couple years ago. I remember from the news. That was crazy. Yeah, pretty much. I'm from Tripoli, though, so, like, bottom-wise, more, yeah, north instead of south, basically. So, yeah, that's where I'm originally from. And, yeah, a bunch of things, government, whatnot. It's a very corrupt government, I would say.

Starting point is 00:05:28 Stuff happened. Our Lebanese lira, basically, our currency started, like, going under. And yeah, at that point, literally my dad put me in this situation where it's like, you either leave or you're going to have to deal with some weird stuff. It was like, you know what, sir, why not? And I popped off. And yeah, it just happened. And was there a reason why I chose London specifically? My brother was already here doing like another unique.

Starting point is 00:05:56 course as well. And we thought it would just be easier for me to acclimate and whatnot. And yeah, he was studying at the University of Kent at the time. And I just joined again in a foundation year in Kent. And from there, moved on. And when you were in Lebanon, were you already interested in being an artist? I was already into graphic design and doing it at my spare time for like organizations, doing it for like different magazines and whatnot. So I thought might as well discover a new sort of industry or like a different field going from 2D to 3D. So was the course you studied actually graphic design? So in uni when I first joined in, it was more like an architecture,

Starting point is 00:06:39 sort of Frankenstein with computer science, which was really weird. At like the University of Kent, I was forced to join as a digital artist or a digital computist or whatnot, but it was nothing. Yeah, I just jumped head on to an architecture course where I was literally studying architecture theory and whatnot. And I guess that's not what you really wanted to do. Absolutely not. It was fun. Don't get me wrong, but like, yeah, nothing of what I had in mind. I still found a way to embed 3D in what I was doing. I think I started making 3D models in auto desks like autocad and like just forced my way into it and they didn't like it obviously.

Starting point is 00:07:17 So I got like horrible grades in my foundation year. But it kind of went through, got through it, got a pass in foundation. It's either a pass or fail. So grades don't matter. And then, yeah, jumped in. I was like, yep, not doing this anymore. Suddenly left and went to London to Hendon and studied at Middle Sex University. Yeah, on from there. And what was the reason for specifically Middlesex?

Starting point is 00:07:41 They just had really nice facilities. So they had like big rooms or like very nice equipment. Like Lebanon isn't in the European Union. So like they even come to the UK, I need to either be on a student visa or a work visa. so I needed to be in the EU to start off my career give or take within the UK so as an EU person you pay like 9K

Starting point is 00:08:01 a year but as a non-EU you need to pay like 12 or 13 grand I was paying all of that from my money I can't get a student loan either so I used all the phone money just on the degree but I wasn't even attending so it was like what am I doing in here? Oh I understand yeah

Starting point is 00:08:19 shouldn't complain with my loan then yeah pretty much I like spent everything I made within like a couple years all went to the drain. But I mean it worked out. Yeah, nice thing. And where did you then get the experience before you started to work in freelance? I started joining like different, what do you call it, modder groups. So there's like Skywind that they make like mods for Skyrim and they're making like more wind inside of Skyrim.

Starting point is 00:08:46 And I just started working with different moders to better my folio. Spend really a lot of time in my rooms that have gone. going out to parties and whatnot, just spend grinding on a foyer that got the first good piece on, applied to a bunch of roles, started doing freelance, contracted work. And from there, jumped on. And that path ended up, like, working really well for me. Yeah, that sounds good. So I guess then after you finished Dune, it was easier for you to start in the industry.

Starting point is 00:09:14 I started after first year of uni, yeah, straight now. So it was kind of sorted for you then. Yeah, I kind of just worked really hard, not going to. lie. So I just spent, again, I'm not attending uni, so I have a lot of time out. So I was just spending time grinding out. Still going to the facilities in uni in first year, second year, because they have amazing facilities. Might as well use them. And just getting a lot of work dished out on my first freelance contract worked out really well. And moved on from there. Just never stopped going. So for how long did you, I mean, you said that you still work as a freelance, right? Still not? No, I'm full time now.

Starting point is 00:09:51 I have my own company where I do freelance. Like fortunately, Omita, which is like basically my family, they allow me to do freelance gigs at the same time. So I'm always in this really nice life to work balance with them. Oh, all right. It's interesting. So after what time did you decide to stop freelance? Never, really.

Starting point is 00:10:10 I still jump on. I still do my freelance gigs. I still run it. But if you're more specifically focusing on when I want to do full time, it's mostly stability. really. So I don't want to keep running from job to job. Yes, it pays a lot better. Yes, it is easier to work with and easier to not focus about end goals and more focus on what we have right now, deliver product and then move forward. But again, I was working way too long. Like I was working throughout the day, throughout the night, doing a bunch of all-nighters to like get through a bunch of different freelance contracts. And I thought I want to like settle down a little. So I joined the company called Move. They do virtual production stuff.

Starting point is 00:10:54 That's where I did like sets for BBC sports. That's where I did like some cool stuff for Tokyo Olympics and whatnot. And yeah, just never stopped ever since. That sounds exciting. Can you tell us more? If you imagine someone who doesn't know anything about virtual production, give us an idea so that we can imagine what do you do, how do you do it and some information. Yeah, that's cool.

Starting point is 00:11:17 So like virtual production in general has been. mostly focused or like dominated by Unreal Engine. And virtual production can have a lot of different approaches or applications in it. There's different LED stages, like massive stages of LED screens where it's playing visuals. And your actor or talent, which we call them, is inside this LED screen and we film around it to replace a green screen. And you end up with the talent or the actor is like more. more immersed within the scene and can see like more of the effect around them. That's one part of virtual production, which is LED screens.

Starting point is 00:11:58 There's green screen where again, completely green screen. The actor exists, we key them out and then we place them in a virtual environment. There's AR where its characters exist and there's visuals happening on top of them or behind them or whatnot. What does it stand for? AR, so augmented reality. and that's where a camera is just shooting something. We have different trackers, so we know exactly where we are in 3D space and in the real world,

Starting point is 00:12:27 and different effects we can start piling up inside of each other. This also can go with the green screen and with the LED screens. And there's finally projection mapping, so you have a projector, and it's shining light on big surface or a big object, and we play visuals on these big surfaces to make cool effects. I see. I think I read it just maybe with Mandalorian that it was filmed that way. They did the LED screens thing.

Starting point is 00:12:57 Mandalrians basically screwed everyone because the way they said it was that LED screens are simple, they're easy, everyone should film everything inside of LED screens. And that started like the big loophole of every single person in their mother wanting LED screens. and to work with them, expecting them to be magic solutions that you can change everything in one go. But yeah, they did boom the industry of LED screens. But it's not that easy, right? Absolutely not.

Starting point is 00:13:25 You still need to build the scene, you still need to light it, you still need to make all these assets. Yes, we can move the assets in real time right in front of you, but once you want the entire scene changed, we can't do that in a single button. And that's something that you get a lot while working on LED stages. the client coming at last minute and asking to change everything basically. And I often heard actors complaining or saying that they don't feel that immersed in a scene

Starting point is 00:13:54 if they are not acting in the natural environment, but they are just around literally green screens. That's why LED screens came in. So you're no longer just looking at green bulbs. You're actually immersed in the environment. You can see the colors. You can see the light reflecting on you. and you build on from there. The only difference is that you're not breathing fresh air,

Starting point is 00:14:17 you're breathing a lot of air conditioners and the heat of the LED screens is boiling you alive, but it is what it is. So what is your role in this process? So as a technical artist, it really depends on what we're working with. I mostly work as a journalist, so I take care of the pipeline.

Starting point is 00:14:36 I make sure it runs well in real time, so there's no lagging, there's no spikes. everything's running smoothly in front of the client. I make sure that the assets work nicely, look nicely. If there's any problems, bugs, errors, I need to take care of that on spot. And sometimes I even need to model the different things

Starting point is 00:14:56 that we need to work with, different functionality. So if different cards need to go from the ground and show you stuff, I also work on that functionality. So what was your first position, just to imagine where basically you are on hierarchy if you are like a junior supervisor something between yeah that's fine so i would say first

Starting point is 00:15:18 full-time position and move i actually never been a junior to begin with i started admit straight away because most of my freelancing just got me up within the hierarchy to say the least so started straight on i think it was a scene for bbc sports it was a wimbledon tennis tournament and they just gave me a scene they were like you know what we want this an engine we don't care how you do it what you're doing, you have this deadline we need it in. That was literally the brief. Did you match? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:48 We actually crushed it. It ended up looking like pretty gorgeous in the end of the day. It was a really cool theme. I think it was Sam as a senior technical artist. There was Giulio or Julian Julian, Julian. And he was like this 3D artist that came on later on and took care of the entire lighting. At that point, my lighting slash color theory wasn't on point. So I asked for help on that.

Starting point is 00:16:12 Julian came in and did like an amazing job at it. So that was his role. And yeah, I had to like set up all the Unreal Engine virtual environment. Sam took care of taking this environment from Unreal Engine and placing it in the real world, making sure the camera tracks it correctly and whatnot, took care of the lighting and virtual space. And we merged all of those together basically. So then when viewer is watching, the goal is so that it looks really. realistic, right? So it's beautiful and everything. Yeah, pretty much. They want like production

Starting point is 00:16:46 value product within a budget and a nutsell. And this is how it ended up, give or take. They had the stage. So they had their seats and they had a nice desk and a setup. And we masked that out and place the environment all around it to make it seem massive and proper. And to get an idea, how long time do you have to finish such a project? And virtual production, time is a social construct. They just want you to push stuff out in seconds. They expect you to get everything rolling. That's one of the reasons why I work in games about and like a lot less in virtual production because of this. There's a lot less planning and a lot more people with money asking for stuff and you can't tell them no because they have the money basically. Can you just roughly

Starting point is 00:17:33 say like a month or two months? It depends per project. I've been on projects where I've had two weeks that changed something from an image to a complete 3D reactive scenes. I've had a couple days to take an already existing 3D scene, change half of it and then push it on. And I think the BBC Sports One took maybe around a couple months, more probably around that, yeah. So if I understand correctly that in games, you've got more time and there's also more money involved in games?

Starting point is 00:18:06 Less money involved, but more time. So virtual production is the highest amount of cash you can ever get to any different industry, I would say. So can you say you prefer games over virtual production? Definitely. In games, the skill set is a lot higher. The amount of people that you're working with that are a lot more knowledgeable and experts in their field are a lot present. If you see a senior, you know really well that this is a dude that knows exactly what they're talking about. Meanwhile, virtual production, like the skill is.

Starting point is 00:18:38 level as a whole is much, much lower. So entrance, if you're a junior or just recently graduated and you want to get into the industry as fast as possible, I would always recommend going to virtual production first. So seeing automobile companies, seeing different people that are dabbling in game engines and just jump on straight through together. So what are the areas where it's being used? Because we just discussed sports, it's in films. You just mentioned automobile companies.

Starting point is 00:19:09 So can it be basically anything when it comes to promotional material? Yeah, I would say. So I've worked in. So for instance, if you're in a shop, there's a big LED screens. And the advertisements on these LED screens are a part of your virtual production scene. They can take a capture of you and add you in the scene and that it becomes AR stuff. And yeah, it just goes into anything that has any sort of advertisements in it. If it's a chocolate bar advertisement, it can just be completely inside Unreal Engine.

Starting point is 00:19:40 You don't really need to bother with anything else. Yeah, so talking about Unreal Engine, how hard is it to learn such a software? I wouldn't say it's hard at all, mostly because it's very mainstream nowadays, and there's a lot of documentation out there, a lot of videos, YouTube tutorials, Vimeo tutorials, UDEMI tutorials, the market is very saturated with a lot of guides that can help you grow within Unreal. If you've never had any experience with any sort of game softwares at all, I would say it's most likely the most beginner-friendly to go in.

Starting point is 00:20:14 The difficulty starts going further and a lot more harder, the more senior you grow, because Unreal makes it. So it's very easy to do this stuff it allows you to do, but very hard to change stuff that aren't meant to just happen within the game engine. Meanwhile, unity is sort of the opposite of that, in which it's somewhat. want a little bit harder to get into, but it's also a lot easier for people that just jumped and play around with it. I don't agree with that sense. I still believe that Unreal is the easiest

Starting point is 00:20:44 and first thing you should look at, but I mean, that's what most people say. What is your level in Unreal? Are you professional or still a lot to learn? Yeah, I would say there's always a lot to learn. I've been using Unreal since Unreal Engine 3, so for like around 10-ish years I've been using it. It's just been a lot of fun to work through it. I do believe I know pretty much a lot of things that go in there. There's always going to be people that make you look like you don't nothing, and this is always going to be the scene. There's no point where you stop growing or you stop learning. That's just the part of being the games industry altogether. Yeah, and are you proficient in the unity as well? Give or take, it's been like around three or four years since I've last used it.

Starting point is 00:21:28 I was using it mostly for freelance gigs, and game engines in the end of the day are all the same as just different ways to do the same thing and it just builds it through i would say yeah so just to make sure that i understand it correctly these softwares are used for both virtual production and the gaming as well right not sure about unity unity is used for a lot of a r stuff so if you have your phone and you put it on the surface it spawns 3d stuff on top of it that's a r in unity there's also XR in which you can then use your finger or your hand. It forms an in 3D and you can interact with 3D objects. That would be the unique type of AR.

Starting point is 00:22:10 But in virtual production, as an LED sets, green screens, I haven't personally seen Unity being used. That is largely dominated by Unreal Engine. That sounds like exciting stuff. I was trying to imagine that in my head. So what are some exciting projects that you worked on when it comes to virtual production before we move to gaming. That's fair.

Starting point is 00:22:33 I've worked on Dubai Expo, which was this really big projection volume. Again, LED or like projectors just projecting light on top of this massive dome. And we had our visuals go on this massive dome. It was a project with Dandelion and Burdock. I still work with them to this day. They're amazing people. And we made this really cool contents that was happening both. So if you're a viewer, you can see it on the walls.

Starting point is 00:22:59 But if you're viewing it from your TV at home, there's more visuals that are happening on top of everything else. Sounds like a big complex project. How long does it take to develop such a big scale? So projects like this usually are different teams that take care of different sets or different parts of it. So I think it was build, a company that was taking care of the projection mapping. They took care of all of that. And then the Daneline and Burdock, us we were tasked to get the visuals happening inside of Unreal. So how long Bill took, I think around the year or less.

Starting point is 00:23:33 I don't really remember the timeline that much. But within our Danlein Burdock team, I'm not sure if it was around three months or more. It's been a while, so I don't quite remember it. Yeah. And what about some challenging projects or something that you may be found hard? In virtual production? Yes. I wouldn't say hard most of the times again virtual production the skill required to get things going is just a lot less so it's mostly me flexing

Starting point is 00:24:03 a nuggin line but I would say the Volvo project for their newest car I think it was called X something and it's about like LIDARS and having point clouds in this like dynamic world where everything is made of dots or circles and I think that project was one of the first where I worked on large LED screens it was a ARI stage in London. And it's, I think, the largest stage in Europe. And yeah, it was a really cool stage. And at that point, I had to think through a lot of pipelines, fix a lot of things that were going wrong on the hardware and software side. And the time frame was really short. And we only got provided the stage like a week before we needed to air or like 10 days before. Which is usually the case. So you have a lot of time to do stuff on your Unreal Engine. But once it goes on the big stages or like the big LED screen, a lot of things are prone to break and you need to deal with them

Starting point is 00:24:59 and you only have like a week or so to deal with them because renting the stage is like 15 grand a day or something like that. And is it so expensive because it's so busy and there aren't that many or because to run everything is expensive? So to run everything with the staff to maintain it is definitely expensive, but it's also all inflated by the demand. like that studio like ori stage is very rarely empty there's always different companies jumping in and up right before we jumped in was like an avengers shoot or something like that and we had to run like

Starting point is 00:25:34 these big players yeah yeah big players warner bros frame store the mill everyone's in there like again everyone's in their mother wants to make stuff just like the mandolorean did it so yeah and have you actually been there physically on such a yeah pretty much much so. This Volvo Rory stage, and when I did the BBC sports, swindled and tennis thing, I don't usually go there physically unless there's a very good

Starting point is 00:26:01 reason for me to be there, basically. But in Volvo, yeah, I needed to be there to fix the hardware, to figure out what's going on, take over what needs to be taken over, and yeah, get it rolling. At Volvo, we shipped a very successful, like, end product. The client loved it. And

Starting point is 00:26:17 yeah, it was good stuff. Yeah, I guess a good experience to be there and see, I can imagine all the technology and what is going on there. I would say virtual production, if you're in person, you mostly learn about politics and how to deal with different people wanting different things rather than you have a task and you need to take care of it. And definitely the Volvo project at RISage was the most eye-opening project I worked on. So it taught me a lot of things personally and professionally to take care of in the real world.

Starting point is 00:26:51 aside from my technical skills, like on the computer. And that was definitely very eye-opening and taught me a lot that I still carry over it until today. And is it similar to film set when it comes to all the people, organization and everything? Yeah, yeah, I would say so. There's a big crane, there's the stagers, there's the steppers. What would they call them?

Starting point is 00:27:14 The runners, there's someone always running to the talent, getting like information to them or giving them water and whatnot. there's a big production scene the client comes with six people and all of them are massively rich and they think to give you orders yeah I would say it's exactly the same at least with LED screens for film

Starting point is 00:27:32 and did you get to see some maybe famous people the CEO of Volvo has been there for like three months the newest CEO of Volvo and he came in and I think that would probably be famous I would say yeah that is so cool

Starting point is 00:27:47 yeah it was cool but in the end of the day you see with a lot of like famous-ish people, they're a different breed. Like, you know, like the aura around, that's something like as a Lebanese with my culture. I don't really look up to that. I just walk back. I don't really care what's happening in there. And just out of curiosity, as someone from Lebanon, do you meet a lot of people from Lebanon, either in London or in industry? In university, I've met a bunch of Lebanese people. and in person, however, I don't think I've met many aside from in university, but digitally, so ironically enough, Omida, I have two other Lebanese guys with me.

Starting point is 00:28:30 Coincident. Yeah, and they both live in Lebanon as well, which was funny. So when I went on holiday, I met them. In the Dubai Expo project with Danlein and Burdock, one of the content creators was also Lebanese, which is like really cool. I think his name was Andre. Yeah. As I said, you are probably the only person from there that I met, but I know a nearby one Lebanese restaurant. Yeah, like it's a coincidence, but cuisine is delicious. We make good food. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:03 Just a quick one. If you enjoy our podcast, please give us a review on your favorite podcast app, subscribe or share it with your friends. For more information, visit the show notes. Thank you and back to the show. So when it comes to gaming, can you please give us a little introduction like before? So again, technical artist has been that throughout my career since day one. Throughout like the games industry, I'm mostly focused on a generalist type of role. So I take care of anything from optimizing characters, mentoring the art team to understand the best practices to ship a game, and working on shaders, tools off the whole,

Starting point is 00:29:44 flying tools, online tools, working on UI. I've worked on all sorts of things really when it comes to the games industry. So it sounds like are you now more senior since you said you are mentoring artists? Yeah, pretty much. I'm a senior technical artist,

Starting point is 00:29:59 Omita, and I've been working with the senior capacity throughout my virtual production career as well. I've been like that for around three or two years now. And it's been running quite nice now, and to remind me what was the reason to going into gaming from virtual production?

Starting point is 00:30:18 The skill set, basically, I believe that if I stayed in virtual production, yes, I'm going to grow financially a lot, get a lot fancier positions a lot faster. But I felt like my skill, I wasn't really happy where I was skill-wise. The amount of knowledge I was absorbing, I was sort of learning it by myself the entire time. So I thought I wanted to grow a lot faster, a lot more, regardless of how much I'm going to get paid. And that's essentially why I joined the game industry, I would say. And obviously don't have to say specifics, but can you compare what is it like when it comes to salaries to compare virtual production to gaming? I would say if you're a mid in games industry, you're probably getting paid anywhere between 30 grand to 45 grand.

Starting point is 00:31:07 If you're a mid in virtual production, if you're mid in games, you're usually senior in virtual production, I would say. but you'd probably be looking at 45 grand up to like 60 grand plus within like a midrull. In general, I would say you can easily go for double whatever you're making in games. Well, why is that? Is it because there are less people because it's more difficult or because there's more money involved? I would say a bit of all of that, give or take. One, the amount of people that are technical is very low in the world in general. Most of them are working in games because they like the,

Starting point is 00:31:42 extra skill set. And aside from that amount of money that comes into virtual production is just a lot higher than in games. In games, you're working on a game for three, four years minimum. Only a specific game. Yes, pretty much. Usually goes a lot longer than this. And you're mostly running either on different games that you published before or on investor money. Just that. But if you're working in virtual production, you have like a month to finish something. The client basically already paid you up on front so you know how to budget your things. And instead of hiring, let's say, an entire team that's going to work together, you get X amount of freelancers and get them on and pay them extra to just get the work done.

Starting point is 00:32:27 Yeah. As you said, when it comes to working on the game, let's say for several years, are there more companies involved in that work or is it specifically for one company? It depends. Publishers usually give out a lot of different different. games for different studios to work on. Some studios are outsourcing studios. So, for instance, when I was working for Climax, Climax Games, on Age of Empires

Starting point is 00:32:52 4, we were working on this for a different company, do different stuff for the different company. And a lot of inter-company work happens a lot of times. And it is the way things happen. Studio can't always take care of the entire game production workflow. So a lot of different studios, instead of focusing. on the macro details. They say we're going to become a company that's so good at coding or at rendering.

Starting point is 00:33:20 We become the best at this and different people start asking them for their services, basically. And out of curiosity, when you went to gaming from VR, why didn't you go to film? It's the same thing as virtual production. So film and virtual production are almost exactly the same. I would say in film, you get paid less than virtual production. but more than games obviously but the amount of stress

Starting point is 00:33:46 the amount of work that needs to go on very quickly the amount of change that's going to happen the planning is a lot less as well so it's more like the same as virtual production okay yeah and did you find it easy to find a job in gaming just wondering

Starting point is 00:34:02 if that change when it comes to your skills if it was that you didn't really need to learn anything new I was already really again within like my second year of uni, I was already working way too much and getting my full year. So it wasn't really like that hard of a transition. I already had most of the skills on what I learned to in virtual production was have to sell myself better and have to seem like a lot more knowledgeable than I probably was at that

Starting point is 00:34:29 time. That helped me out like do this transition a lot easier, I would say. And in general, I was just lifeless. I was doing nothing but working. So I did know quite a bunch of things. And I can imagine you build up quite a solid portfolio so it was easier for you to apply right yeah pretty much so most of my career i've never had a single role at once i was always doing a freelance gig at the side so i've been rushing through projects always taking a side project that can be done in a week or two so i can add more stuff to my folio and when you work on a lot of different projects you learn a lot of things mostly from mentally stealing them from different approaches and pipelines you've went through so you build this mental library about this

Starting point is 00:35:13 begillion different techniques. And I think as a successful technical artist, one very important thing is to be able to take a lot of random information. You don't specifically need to understand 100%, but you need to be able to get that idea on your

Starting point is 00:35:29 mind straight ahead, on point, and apply it in one way or another. Yeah. And when it comes to competition in gaming industry, if I compare it to film, at least From my experience, I feel like that there are a lot of people who want to get into the industry, so then it's quite hard to stand out or to get in.

Starting point is 00:35:49 Is it same or similar in a gaming? Are we talking within a junior kind of no experience wanting to jump to the industry, or are we talking about someone senior in virtual production trying to jump in? I would say rather junior, when it comes like two new entrants. I would say games industry is a lot harder to get in, mostly because there's a lot of people that are really good competing for junior roles. Yes. In virtual production, it's a lot, lot, a lot easier to get into it. You don't really need that much skill going on.

Starting point is 00:36:21 But if you're talking about, so I have really good work on my side, I'm confident of my skills. I don't have experience yet. How do I break into the industry? Join different organizations, go to different Discord groups, volunteer on different game projects and build your portfolio. whatever degree or grades you're going to bring mean nothing to a recruiter. If you have a good portfolio, you show that you have good work.

Starting point is 00:36:47 That's all you need to break into the game industry. And that's what you're sorted. So it's not really about grades. Never about grades. Grades don't matter at all. No one cares. Whether you have like a single degree or three masters if your portfolio looks like shit,

Starting point is 00:37:03 you're going nowhere. And when it comes to higher positions, I would say, again, depends on your folio and how good you can sell yourself, whether you have 12 years of experience in the industry, but your portfolio looks like shit, you're going nowhere. And I think that's one big important part. If you want to stand out in any stage in your career,

Starting point is 00:37:25 in the games industry or the virtual production industry, I would say your portfolio is your bread and butter. And I would say second to that would be your personality, not as in are you happy, are you fun, are you sad, or whatnot, more of how well you can sell yourself. So whether you know something 100% or not, you need to sell it like you know everything about it. And I think that's the most important part in getting the job.

Starting point is 00:37:50 So when I did my first interview for a full-time job, I maybe did not know all the details about everything. I had large knowledge of a lot of different things, but not super specific details or in-depth. And it was mostly about me trying to sell myself as a very experienced person. that can go on. And I think a very important mentality to have is you're not asking for a recruiter to take you. You're offering your services to someone and they want you basically. So that different mentality when you properly crack it in your head, it becomes a lot easier to be more confident

Starting point is 00:38:28 when speaking, basically. Yeah, that's great advice. And speaking of advice, what are some tips from your career that you would recommend to people maybe working in the industry or trying to get into the industry? Portfolio is your bread and butter. Communication is key. Would it start to develop in your portfolio already during the university, right? Definitely. Your coursework means almost nothing in the end of the day unless you were working with like a good group. I would say compare your work to the work of the professionals in the industry. That's what a professional in the industry. That's what a professional in the industry is looking for unless they're specifically looking for interns if your work doesn't look on par with what the current talent is offering you're really going nowhere when it comes to that so if

Starting point is 00:39:18 you're at first year or third year of uni or whatever you're at go to our station go to be hands compare what the industry is providing does your work look next to this close to this similar to this yes start applying straight away it doesn't matter if you just joined uni if you're doing your sixth master, fly straight away. If you're looking at your folio, it looks like a bunch of Lego blocks from Lender. Take a step back, work on your folio, push it out. And it just is what it is.

Starting point is 00:39:46 It's the sad reality of, I would say universities trying to sell that the game industry is easy. I think my university tried to convince me that there's a game union happening or whatnot, and it's going to be easy to, like, pop on. It wasn't true. No, none of that was true. I knew none of that was true,

Starting point is 00:40:05 but you can't do that. It just does what it is. And how popular was actually the course? Let's say when it comes to classmates, where there are a lot of people? I don't remember maybe 30, 40 people, I would say. It was big class. It wasn't small in any regards.

Starting point is 00:40:21 I don't want to sound stereotypical. But does the class consist like of nerds or not really? Half, half, I would say. You know, there's a bunch of computer techie nerds with like cool, funny, like more. scientific jokes and there's some super punk rock people and then there's like the in-betweeners. It's just basically your basic Netflix movie overview of a high school, really, just a diversity. There's a lot of random people that are just doing it for the hell of it.

Starting point is 00:40:52 I would say the one thing that I was surprised about because again in Lebanon, we're just tight-knit community. The amount of diversity that I saw in uni was insane. Like there's just way too many countries in one class. Yeah, I felt the same. People from all around Europe or even around the world. Definitely. It's pretty insane. And would it be possible

Starting point is 00:41:15 or what's the level of gaming courses in Lebanon? Would it be possible to study there as well? I don't think there's any specific game visual art courses. There's one in the University of Belamand. My friend did that course there. I think it was

Starting point is 00:41:31 called Visual Arts. It's an ALBA section in University of Belamend. And it does have a little bit of 3D. It's mostly focused on 2D art, digital painting, digital art. That's what that course is focused on. I think there's game programming in American University of Beirut. But I'm not that knowledgeable in these like different courses. And I apologize I interrupted you before when you were giving advice.

Starting point is 00:41:59 So is there something he would like to share? So we did mention folio. We mentioned communication. Communication is definitely key. You only grow within your career once you know how to work with your team a lot better. And that sort of teamwork that's happening can only begin or start via communication. And that also brings the second part, which is teamwork, teamwork, teamwork, teamwork. You need to depend on your team and you need to be confident that your team can provide the work and guidance.

Starting point is 00:42:31 and maybe sometimes the mentorship that you're required to get a job done. I would say mental health is very important. I personally never had any issues throughout my career, but I've seen a lot of people just keep all that stress inside and then suddenly just leave on well-being, like sick leave, and then just stop working in that specific studio or industry altogether. And I think it's very important to take a step back and think about work to life balance.

Starting point is 00:43:00 That's very important. In virtual production, crunching is very often and is almost required or requested and common. What is crunching? Crunching is when you work after hours. Oh yeah, overtime, right? Overtime, yes, mandatory overtime, I would say. It's very common in virtual production, but in games, it's frowned upon nowadays, which is really good. If you're crunching, that means production fucked up, basically.

Starting point is 00:43:29 You kind of need to get that going. One time, one of my friends, like a funny story, that he had to crunch in games, was because they screwed up at Shader and all the different culture people became white, and the game was shipping in like two days. So they did it. So that's one example. I would say, you know, maybe crunching is fine. I guess when it's like exceptional occasion, not something that happens regularly.

Starting point is 00:43:54 Definitely, definitely. But at the same time, we're working in games. We're not saving lives. no one's going to die if that bug exists in the first batch or in the final game or just we delay the game a little and that's just completely fine to go that a lot of games end up underperforming because they try to push them very fast and just taking your time making good production schedule is very important in games and i feel like it's done well yeah so based on what you said would you say that it's let's say less important or less urgent than when

Starting point is 00:44:29 in film because I feel like when it comes to film it needs to follow the deadline and the film in cinema needs to be perfect. So in game is it not like that? Not white I would say it's not forced to be within this and when it is you end up with lower quality or like lower value reduction I would say. Yeah and the game that comes to my mind is cyberpunk although I don't play games I don't know pretty much anything but I didn't miss it about this one that people are really excited and then they came out and it was full of bucks

Starting point is 00:45:05 how was it possible how come you try to hype up a game you maybe screw up production wise when you try to push a game because the investors are forcing you to or production reasons or marketing reasons and you didn't provide it

Starting point is 00:45:23 that much attention or focus on it and I think at that point the biggest problem is that their engine just couldn't handle all these things, and they were hacking on top of hacking, on top of hacking to make it work, and then just down spiral, basically. And production wanted them to still push the game at that time.

Starting point is 00:45:42 And that's when a lot of things start to break or go wrong, I guess. And at one point, when you start shipping, it's less about, I want to polish this thing, and more about we just need to push it out. And that's how a lot of bugs happen. And this is why, for instance, Red Dead Redemption, where they worked on it for like tens of years is absolutely perfect with a lot of small cool details. But something like cyberpunk where they had a smaller production schedule, but they started pushing it very quickly. It starts getting like over each other's head, I would say.

Starting point is 00:46:17 And do you think it's worth it in the end? Let's say looking at the example of cyberpunk. Imagine working on something for 10 years of your life. making it your baby, giving your all to it, and then everyone's giving it bad reviews. Would that be worth it to you or would that crush you completely? That's that. No, I don't want to say, I understand it's definitely not easy decision, but wouldn't it be then more rational to just postpone it for, let's say, a few months to put it? It's up to the people with the money. It's not up to anyone, any game dev, any lead, really. The side when something is going to ship, they can give advice. They can give advice.

Starting point is 00:46:57 but as long as the investors want something done, the end of the day you're selling a product. It's your baby as a new work on it, but it belongs to a company, bigger organization that's paying you to get this product coming out. And that's just the case in a lot of games. It's a product you're selling.

Starting point is 00:47:14 You're not making this game to better humanity or like sold the plague, you know? You're just pushing a product. You're expected to make a lot of money out of it. Yeah, that makes sense. And I'm not sure how does it work, but again with the example of Cyberpunk when it gets released there are these bugs does it get like updated after some time yeah these are called hot fixes or patches and essentially they just

Starting point is 00:47:38 capture a bunch of bugs see how easy they are to fix and they start fixing them by like difficulty scale and how often bugs happen and do they do it regularly or does it happen let's say after six months then year and then they stop depends on production schedules so for instance at Omida, we push on a new patch, a massive update with new heroes and whatnot every month. Sometimes because we made a big change, some bugs appear that our QA team couldn't go through for whatever reason. Someone mentions it. We start making hot fixes. So we then have version 0.7.1, 0.7.2. Mostly because we're a live game that's online and multiplayer. So it's very important to just keep the experience very pristine and very like quality oriented for our players.

Starting point is 00:48:29 Which brings me to the conversation of hyping up our game. We're working on predecessor. It's a 5B5 mugba. It's based on Paragon. So we use like Paragon assets. We made our game predecessor. It's running. It's 5B5. It's beautiful. It's out now. Get it. Sounds exciting, but it sounds like a foreign language. I don't really know much. I'm not going to lie. It's a cool game. It's 5B5 game. Sorry, what does it mean? Five against five? Yes, against other people.

Starting point is 00:48:59 Each person is a character. It's third person game, but it also carries concepts from League of Legends and Dota. So you shoot other characters, your enemies, or you hit them, but you also have abilities that you can use for your own custom heroes. Each person can choose a unique hero. That unique hero has different abilities. different stats. He can be melee. He can be arranged and you fight like the other side and you try to be victorious and stomp the other side. And what is it going to be released? It's already open on a

Starting point is 00:49:35 beta phase. So we're on alpha. Anyone can buy the game currently. It's I think 20 bucks and we have like different stages. So epic and then like different bundles. Eventually once we completely release the game and it's no longer in beta stage is going to be completely free. So for now, it's more like beta testing for you as a player to support us and get the game running a lot better through development. Oh, wow, nice. Is it for PC or PlayStation? It's currently PC only.

Starting point is 00:50:07 We're very actively working on getting it running on console, and we even announced that console is coming soon. And yeah, we're getting that through. And actually, how does the process, of creating the game differ if it's for console or for PC, if it differs. A lot, I would say. Unreal Engine makes it a lot easier than a lot of different custom engines that companies provide. But in the end of the day, you're no longer using keyboard and a mouse. There's a controller. So all the UI needs to react with the controller instead of having a mouse

Starting point is 00:50:43 floating around. So for instance, you can't move a mouse to look around. You need to have a controller stick where the more you're holding the controller stick the faster the movement is going that kind of stuff happens so that's a lot of the thing you need to like keep in mind there's also conditions that sonny and microsoft need or like order you to provide in order to for them to accept putting your game in the market so like minimum font size this sort of DRC check that you need to go through for them to accept even putting your game in the market and that's aside from performance stuff is also on the computer. Usually your hardware is a lot better. So it's easier to run the game. But on consoles like the PlayStation 4, for instance, you have a lot less performance

Starting point is 00:51:29 to play with and you're supposed to optimize or better a lot of systems to make them run using less memory and less bandwidth. So can you say one is easier than the other? PC is the easiest, I would say. Once you need to port that console, each console has its own mind. You need to cater for the console in order for it to not bite you in the ass, basically. Would you develop one and then update it or start developing the other one, or do you do it simultaneously at the same time? Simultaneously is the way to go through. So if you start the game, knowing which platforms you want to ship in

Starting point is 00:52:08 and build with the ideology of supporting console and mind, that would be the best approach, but sometimes you just build it for a PC or build it for console and you need to start supporting different hardware. And talking about console, does it mean both PlayStation, Xbox, I don't know, even Nintendo or what's being used?

Starting point is 00:52:28 Yeah, as console usually refers to PlayStation Xbox, Nintendo Switch is more like, I would say, lower end consoles that you need to deal with because it's a lot smaller, so there's a lot less performance and hardware for you to work with. So you kind of need to optimize. for that as well. And do you have one you prefer to working on? PC is just the easiest, least

Starting point is 00:52:49 headache available. Problem with PlayStation and Xbox is that a lot of the information and bugs and stuff that exist are contained within a very secret community or like a very hard-to-reach community that you need to pay money to reach. So I would say information is a lot less widespread than PC. How come is that? it's specific to Sony IP so it belongs to Sony it belongs to Microsoft you need to ask for their permission so in a PC if there's problems happening it's easy for you to debug them and find out what's wrong by going into the memory of the PC and seeing what's happening that even enter the memory of any console you need to purchase a deaf gift which will like cost you around two to three tens of grants to then be able to do the things you can do normally on a PC but is it still in the end

Starting point is 00:53:40 worth it to develop it for both. You open up to a bigger market and different markets have different players. Not everyone is a PC player. A lot of people play exclusively console. A lot of people nowadays are still only playing on PlayStation 4 and not on PlayStation 5 so that you're opening for bigger markets, I would say.

Starting point is 00:54:00 Same thing like the language. If you start translating your game to different languages, you open to a lot of bigger logger. And what about you? Are you a gamer? Yeah, I would say I do game quite often but when you start working in the game industry

Starting point is 00:54:14 you play a lot less games and just... And console or PC? PC mostly. Actually my friend lent me their PlayStation 4 so I used to play a bunch of console but I mostly like a PC player

Starting point is 00:54:27 give a deck. Do you feel like you have different experience since you work in it? Does it maybe ruin your enjoyment of the game? I doubt about it. Yeah, definitely. You started thinking about these

Starting point is 00:54:38 small these, especially as a technical artist there's an artist and not a programmer. You start noticing a lot of things that shouldn't be there or are low quality and they take away from your enjoyment of the game, I would say. So sometimes when you launch a game, everything starts very

Starting point is 00:54:54 low resolution, pixelated and then it gets prettier. That's just when the game loads. You don't notice that when you're just running through the game, but when you're actively working, you're like they did this very slow. I don't like it. Yeah. And do you played the games that you worked on? Are you like curious to play it or are you like oh I spend so much

Starting point is 00:55:15 I don't want to give or take yes so like at omita we play predecessor every week together as a team we call it play test we just play together against each other and we just have fun with it so that's mostly when I play a predecessor I used to play it a lot more like solo but the more work I have the lot less I'm bothered to really play games at all I would say and I most mostly play when my girlfriend is playing. She's much more of a, like, gamer than I. So I just jump on board and whatever she's playing. I just jump out.

Starting point is 00:55:47 What is your favorite game? Favorite game? There's a Plague Stale by, I forgot the name of the studio. They're a really cool studio, but it's called the Plague Stale. It's a story about, like, a sister and her younger brother, and they're, like, running through this wrath plague that's going through, like, the world, and you kind of go through this really cool,

Starting point is 00:56:08 conquest where you're protecting your younger kids or your younger brother to go through like these different events. Very cool. It's a really cool game. There's Morda Haas as well, which is like for honor. You're just a soldier and it's a 64 map. So 64 people playing against each other. You have a sword and you realize how bad you are at the game because everyone's like

Starting point is 00:56:29 completely destroying you. That's a cool game. I play a bunch of indie games as well. So games that just aren't that known and just are really cool. There's a game called Life is Hell, I think, or Love is Hell, one of those. And it's a really cool, like, 2D pixel game that, like, engulfs you and the effects and whatnot. There's probably a biggillion other games that just aren't popping onto my head, like SkyRamp, Fallout and whatnot. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:56 And what is your favorite film? Because when it comes to virtual production, they have some favorite films or TV series? I'm not sure. I have a favorite, I would say House MD. It's a series that's like super old house MD. I love that series. There's The Mentalist, also an amazing series, also super old. These are series are like the core pillar of what I think good series are.

Starting point is 00:57:21 I also watch Beaky Blinders, which is also super cool. I watch a bunch of anime as well. Quite very, yeah, but sounds good. Yeah, I don't have a genre even in games. I just, whatever I find slowly interesting to me, I just hop on to that. Yeah, that sounds good. So do you want to promote yourself if you want people to follow you or even to look at your work somewhere? Absolutely not.

Starting point is 00:57:47 Let's be. I need to playpredecessor.com. Go on that. Why not? I have too much work going on. So like I don't want more work, I would say. Okay. So at least promote the work that you are working on.

Starting point is 00:58:00 Yeah, play predecessor.com, man. Go through it. It's a cool game. It's 585. It's nice. You want to hit me up for questions. soon as there you want to connect on LinkedIn. It's Zaddeb, like LinkedIn slash n slash jaddeb if you want to hit me up on there.

Starting point is 00:58:13 I have any questions. You're aspiring to join the game industry. I'm more than happy to like help you out. Give you some tips and whatnot. We're also hiring Omita for senior skill sets, senior technical artists, senior VFX artists. So if you're experienced, you want to join a really cool development process. We're fully remote. We're also like chill.

Starting point is 00:58:33 We hang out together. that you can hop on again play Predds or just Google Almeda and see the job positions opening. I will get the links and add them to the show notes. I appreciate you, man. And I wonder then if you are hiring, is it hard to find people or hard to find good people? Yeah, yeah, I would say it's very hard for especially technical arts skill set. I would say programming is a lot easier. So for programming, it's more about finding really skilled people.

Starting point is 00:59:02 for like tech or VFX is finding people. Yeah, yeah, that sounds all good. Then I would just thank you for your time. And for a great chat, I've never spoken to anyone from the gaming industry. So I hope it didn't sound too, how do I say it? Like someone who doesn't know literally anything, but I'm not going to lie, I don't know. But I was curious to find out. Oh, that's fine, buddy.

Starting point is 00:59:25 Like, I hope I gave you some general education on like VP slash game industry as a technologist. call artist approach and hopefully help to whoever's listening to have a general idea of how to get into the game industry the different traits you need to have to do that and yeah again if anyone's trying to jump in if anyone's trying to get a higher within the industry please don't hesitate to hit me up see what's up let's connect let's get stuff yeah definitely just thank you i appreciate it i will stay in touch and wish you good luck with the game sounds good buddy Thank you, man. Take care.

Starting point is 01:00:06 Thank you for listening to Produced by. Subscribe to our podcast in your favorite podcast at, leave a review or send us your feedback. For more information about the host, links from the episode and ways to connect with us, visit the show notes. If you know someone who would be an ideal guest for our podcast, please get in touch. Thank you and see you soon.

Produced By - #25 - Jad Deeb: Technical Artist Perfecting His Craft from Virtual Production to Gaming

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