An Interview with JP "GrimmOmen" Harrod
Many have known GrimmOmen and his work on on the art side of UO. What some may not realize is the title change and direction he has taken within the team. We asked GrimmOmen for a bit of his time this week to update us on his end of UO development and in return was given some very well thought out and honest answers. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I have.
As a refresher for some new to the community can you tell us a bit of your personal history with UO as a gamer?
Well, I played through several of the later versions of Ultima many years before, but I didn't start playing UO until I was hired on by EA as an artist for UO. But since then, I've put in a LOT of time playing UO. I haven't been playing though for a while. Life and work responsibilities have curtailed my game playing in general. For the record, I play a Mage, Smith, and Thief (yes, a thief) on LS Shard (but I don't use Grimm, FYI, so don't go looking to hunt me down!!!) - And I play both Tram and Fel.
Where did you get your start in art development?
A loooong time ago, actually. Got an associates degree in graphic design from a community college, went to the Academy of Art in San Francisco. But most of my art experience has been on the job. I did layout and paste-up (yea, with actual WAX and PICTURES, before digital cameras!) at a small weekly ad magazine in San Luis Obispo. Then I worked as an IT guy at a small media company in San Francisco. Then I got my first gig as a game artist back in, like, '97 or 98. Worked with a company called 3DO for a while (where I first met CatHat). There I worked on platforms ranging from N64 to Playstation to PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, and PC. Then I did some contracting work for NVIDIA, then did some work for the US Army (again with CatHat), and then on to UO where eventually my path crossed yet again with CatHats.
That's my work history in a nutshell.
We have seen your title change from Art Director to CG Supervisor. Can you lay out what you did and what you are doing now?
Well, since my start with UO, I've gone from Character Artist, to Character Lead, to Art Director, to Associate CG Supervisor.
I started out doing the concept art and making the armor and some of the weapons for Samurai Empire. at that time I also started updating the tools the animators were using to process animations for the creatures. Those animators really had it rough then. After UOSE, I had done so much work on the tools for animations, and had learned so much of the character pipeline, I was made character lead. From that point on, I worked to streamline the pipeline and make the character folks job as easy on them as possible. When you don't have to spend half your time just getting assets into a game, you can use that time to make the art better. And that is the direction we have been heading in since. I was Art Director for UOML and learned a lot of valuable lessons there (although I was happy to bring back the old UO spiders and gouls), then chose to go back into character lead for UOKR which is still the most ambitious project I've ever worked on - honestly, I'd prefer to never go through something like that again. It was tough. I stayed on as Character Lead for most of UOSA, and just before the transition to Mythic, I moved into the Associate CG Supervisor role for Ultima where I've been the UO art Yoda ever since (mostly cause I talk backwards a lot).
Creating and maintaining a living art pipeline is definitely a full-time job in itself. I'm actually amazed at how far we've come since I started with UO. Generally speaking, since UOSE, the art pipeline has been completely overhauled with every expansion since. This means that how we did things for UOSE was completely different from how we did things in UOML, UOKR, and UOSA. The pipeline was, if not completely different, ay least substantially different that required new tools and tool overhauls. Fortunately, getting art in the game keeps getting easier, so we're heading in the right direction.
When we get new artists in, I always hear something like this "You know, I thought that since UO was, like 12 years old and a 2D game, that this would be a piece of cake. It's WAaaay harder than I thought." A lot of folks don't realize that we have all the artistic and technical challenges of game development sprinkled with all the problems and challenges of an animated series. Just with animations alone, most modern games animators just do the animations to aesthetic guidelines and let the engineers worry about animation compression. But since we work with actual rendered frames, we have to count every frame because it translates to larger file sizes, and larger patch sizes. When we add something in UO, I usually do a cost analysis so that we know that adding X number of assets translates into an XXX increase in on-disk footprint. I even go into each animation of each asset and figure out how to optimize our rendered frame count to save as much disk space as possible. In addition, I had to write a custom render farm-like application that would allow me to process (render out) the colossal number of frames for UOKR and again for UOSA. For the EC client for UOSA alone, I rendered out and processed over 1.3 million frames of animation several times over - this is the frame count equivalent of about 20 episodes (roughly one season) of an animated series getting rendered out several times over in the course of development.
Using hindsight, are there items you would have done differently if you could have seen where the game is now?
Well, it's always a balance of time and resources, isn't it? But there are plenty of things I wish I had done differently. Most of them are around UOML. I wish I had fought harder about making Elves truly unique (as I did with Gargs - although Gargs got changed again after I left the Lead Character Artist position for UOSA). I also wish I had the time and resources to do 2D and 3D versions of the creatures for UOML. At that time we were strapped for help and following the in-place process of just making the 3D client versions of assets and using those for the 2D client. This is why you see creatures like the Kraken in the Legacy client that's all low-poly. I also wish I had played a closer role in the creation of Heartwood.
But as I said, it's always a balance of time and resources, and you don't always get to do what you want to do, so the best you can do is be a good student and learn from your mistakes and try your best not to recreate them going forward.
The way the community responds to change seems to run the pendulum back and forth to extremes from not enough to too much change. How do you temper that feedback for both clients?
Well, feedback from the community comes in different flavors. In my opinion, I see comments as fitting into a few categories: True Good (Nothing but positive honesty i.e. "Go Team!"), Neutral Good (Polite, but honest Critiques i.e. "I don't like that XXX works XXX way. Why did you guys do that?"), and Chaotic Good (Rants, not terribly politic, but honest - but comes from a place of love for UO). I think, like 90 or 95 percent of feedback falls into these three categories, but there are those that fall into the "Chaotic Neutral" category of just ranting for ranting sake, or people taking advantage of anonymity to be mean spirited and destructive. I generally just put them on my ignore list which is a shame since this means that if they do post a genuine question that I might be able to help out with, it'll go unheard. Fortunately, though, I only have about 3 people on my ignore list in my 6 years of Development on UO. So that's not to bad.
As for the range of comments, you take the good with the bad. If they're good, take the pat on the back, but don't let it go to your head. If it's negative - you just have to evaluate what is said to see if it's accurate or applicable, and make changes if so, if not, I think it's good form to at least acknowledge the difference in opinion. As for the Chaotic Neutral comments, I think it's still a good idea to look through them. Sometimes there are good ideas in them even if they are surrounded in "unpleasantries."
We've seen more artistic design with each new holiday, not "borrowed" graphics from previous items retagged with a different name. Any hints on what's in store this year?
No, no hints, but it's always been a thorn in our side to have to reuse past art. But again, it's an issue of time a resources. We've actually had a lot of fun putting together the items for Christmas and Valentines Day, and we've been very happy at the reactions.
Are there any pet projects you would focus on given the time?
Oh yea, plenty of stuff I'd like to do. Male paper doll revamps are in the works, plus other stuff that I can't talk about, but will hopefully be totally cool. I'd love to spend more time on the EC's UI.
Lastly and I think most importantly..how are the bagpipes coming along? *winks*
Well, I just finished my new album, "Cat Flogging and Other Sounds Pipes We're Not Meant to Make." LOL! Seriously though, they're coming along great. Learning the pipes is something I've wanted to do for years, and as you know, my wife sprang for my new set of Wallace pipes in December, so I've been getting used to em. It's like learning 2 different instruments: the practice chanter and the pipes. The playing dynamics are totally different when you have to concentrate on playing the song, breathing air in the bag at regular intervals, and making sure you're applying the right pressure so your drones don't pitch or cut out all together. The men and women who have been playing these things for years make it look easy, and I hate them for it. ;-)
It's also been cool learning piping from a historical perspective. One thing that I think is really special is the fact that for hundreds of years, piping music was passed from teacher to student by ear. So once written music came to piping, they kinda had to shoehorn the songs in to the time signatures. So often you'll see songs written in or 6/8 time that are actually only "sorta" or 6/8 time. Then there are songs like piobaireachd which sometimes not even written with a time signature. To quote from Galaxy Quest " the controls are really more art than science." So this is why when you're learning new songs, you'll start with the timed signature to learning the note work, then once you have it down you're instructor will be like, "Ok, now here's how you really play it." Or in lots of cases you'll sing through a song to learn how to play it. It feels really steeped in history, and I enjoy it immensely. FYI, for the curious, an example of piobaireachd music can be heard here .
When I get a song to a place where I don't MIND being videoed, I'll post it to Youtube and send a link out via Stratics or something for the community to giggle over.
Thank you JP for taking the time out for the community to give us an update. We hope as the UO players read this and comment they keep in mind what category their opinions fall in.
- AirmidCecht
UO Stratics News Administrator and Friend
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