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You know that thing where people ask ‘what’s something that you could talk for an hour about without any preparation?’ I think I have two of those.

One is old video games.

The other is 3D modelling and animation.

Okay, maybe three things. I could probably talk about Star Trek episodes starting at the original series through to the end of DS9, but no one would want to hear any of that.

Okay, so just the 3D modelling and animation stuff then.

The history of it. The processes and techniques. Different programs. The technology of chewing through polygons and spitting the resultant pixels up to a screen. Any part of it.

I have messed with so many different aspects of Computer Generated Imagery over the years that I think in vertices. I can picture Cartesian coordinates, matrix transforms, and vector manipulations in my head.

I know that isn’t special. There are lots of people out there who can do the same. Many who can do it way better than I can.

Today I was writing something a bit different. A class.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s a class. Maybe it’s a talk. Maybe it’s about 40 minutes of rambling. In any case, it’s about 3D graphics and how to think about setting up a workflow that gets objects out of Blender or Maya or whatever, and get those objects into whatever game engine you are using.

I am writing it out and making slides and visual material to go along with it, so the whole talk should be cleaner and easier to listen to than if I just went off the cuff, but I can say, without any doubt, that I could talk uninterrupted on this topic for an hour at least.

Hopefully that will end up being a good thing. I might just bore a room full of game devs for an hour.

Wouldn’t be the first time.