Technical Artist Intern 0912
January 08, 2009
Project Name
Digital Backlot or Automated Metadata Indexing and Analysis
Project Description
ICT – Institute for Creative Technologies’ Digital Backlot project (DB) and the Automated Metadata Indexing and Analysis (AMIA) project at USC are creating a library of re-usable art assets, authoring production pipeline standards, and researching automated tagging and search methodologies. The work performed at the ICT requires rapid prototyping and simulation creation, which drives the need for these deliverables. Over the past 4 years, ICT projects have generated over 500,000 art assets which are held in a digital repository. The art assets are being organized into a library to support re-use. However, we found that having them in a library was not enough because they had been built to disparate standards and therefore would not inter-operate. To help the inter-operability of the assets, we developed standards for the art which is commonly called the “art pipeline”. The pipeline standards developed by the DB team include Naming Conventions, Scale Definitions, UV Layouts, Metadata Schemas, game engine export procedures and best practices in art content production. These standards facilitate location, reuse and cross-compatibility among projects. Another challenge to re-use is knowing when an asset exists so it is not recreated. We needed to index and tag all of the assets so that they can be found and used. We quickly found that manually indexing an ever growing collection of assets was not possible and we needed to find automated methods for the tagging of the assets. The AMIA project is researching methods to automate the indexing of the assets already held in ICT’s Digital Backlot.
The AMIA effort is in collaboration with USC’s Signal Image Processing Institute (SIPI), run by Dr. Jay Kuo. The DB and AMIA project’s long term goal is to create a repository of reusable interoperable assets that can be searched, shared and utilized reducing the cost of the creation of simulation environments.
Job Description
Interns on the Digital Backlot and AMIA projects would contribute to the further creation of the Digital Backlot libraries of clean and indexed assets. Art assets would be converted to standardized naming and conventions for the art work. Keywords and descriptions of assets need to be entered into the search tool. High quality assets should be moved into distribution libraries and checked for standards compliance. Additional roles are available in the research of methods for automating the tagging/indexing of the assets and the creation of applications to support searching and delivering the art needed. The projects could support interns in the role of artists and could also support interns in the role of software developers.
Specific tasks for artist could include:
Updating the art work to new standards
Renaming artwork
Indexing and describing art work
Skill Needed: Basic knowledge of 3D art creation and Maya
Specific tasks for software developers could include:
Developing software for creating tags and descriptions of artwork
Creating software supporting searching and delivering assets
Extending the Digital Asset Management system for additional librarian capabilities
Skill Needed: Knowledge of scripting languages and interest in automated cataloguing