The Flight Simulator Art Team

Today I had the opportunity to meet two of the Flight Simulator MVPs, Nick Whittome and Dr. Geoff Cohen as they came over to join Jason for an art walk (btw Nick, look! You got your link -hehe).

Jason has a cool write up of the walk over on his blog.

I love the art walks.  Even though I interact daily with a small subset of the art team (mostly Jason, Pete and Adrian), it's amazing to see what the rest of our wonderful art team are doing with our new graphics technology. They really are putting some features - features that I wish I could talk about - to really interesting uses that I had never envisaged.

It's great to see our idea for a generic and flexible architecture put to such great use.  Remove the technological straight-jacket from your customer and watch them get all creative.  We're really making a big effort in this cycle to be an enabler for art.

Actually, that's another interesting point.  We're quite lucky in the graphics team in that as well as having actual paying customers (i.e. you guys that buy the product at retail), we have the art team are our direct, in-house customer.  By providing them with a functional and highly maleable pallette to work with, they turn around and use that to make great art.

I love graphics.  It's such an immediate, instant gratification!

As we we're doing the art walk, Nick and Geoff's jaws were literaly hitting the floor.  Personally I was astounded with the wonderful quality of the models, texturing, animation and application of the "secret sauce".  I couldn't have been happier as thoughts like "I enabled that!" kept bouncing around my in head.  It's such a trip, working with these incredibly talented artists (oh, and some of them don't just build Flight Simulators).

I can't wait for you to see it too.