The joys of bidding...

So I was approached to do a CG project. Im in the middle of bidding fun. Now this is all pre-rendered work for training. Now I was thinking why not a "serious game". Its just a character, some equipment... and they wanted to show various angles. They still want the pre-rendered work but they completely love the idea of doing a real-time application. So I get to bid an extra item for the work.

The way we bid things when doing a full cg production is figure out how many days it takes a single artist to complete a task. Lets say we take an example of creating a scene with a car.

So id say

5 modeling/uvs
3 texture
3 layout
3 animation
5 color and lighting
2 render
2 comp

We then multiply out how many days for type of artists rate. We try to go a little over on bids but the producers a lot of times try to cut things down to make sure the bid price isnt too high. That way we get the job. If we go over budget well thats a different story of how we try to make up the difference. hehe. I try not to worry about that too much and just make sure we hit our deadlines. We can then take the total number of hours and see how many artists we will need to complete the task in time and if the tasks can be split up. Across a single scene this usually doesnt work well but across a whole sequence is how we divide stuff up. Im going to try to apply this to the game side but ill have to overbid the coding part just because things always take longer than you anticipated.

The biggest bid I helped put together was for a feature film. 8 minutes of CG in HD and in stereo (left and right eye). Normally we may have bid this a little low but we had to create this in 3 months. That required us to staff up by over 20+ people in a week to two weeks time. That along with all the equipment and software that had to be purchased the bid came up to be several million(they paid it). I was always thinking to myself about how the figures got up so high but now doing my own bid for a large scale project its really showing me why. The rental space alone for an office to fit everyone in Santa Monica/LA comes up to around 72k for a year. It be nice to be able to setup somewhere cheaper but the artists that are being hired and the client want the location in LA... and in a safe location non the less. Otherwise it makes things a bit more harder. Since the client is paying its ok but it be nice if the money could go to something else. Desks, workstations, software (maya is 7k a seat for complete minus the support contracts, 1.6k for adobe suite, etc etc), and utilities all add up with even out adding the salaries of 10 people.

Well its a couple weeks until the bid is due. Im technically the only one in the running and I know the target bid price. As long as their parent company(if youve gone to a gym youve used one of their products) oks it. It hopefully *knock on wood* will go through. Then time to pay for commercial Torque licenses if they want the real-time option. :) hehe.