Blog for Juan Rubio at GarageGames.com

The joys of bidding...

Juan Rubio — 2007-01-05T01:23:54+00:00

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.

Working for SCEA and Update...

Juan Rubio — 2006-11-26T07:34:36+00:00

So im living in LA... and I work in San Diego. This is a little painful. Hehe. I started working at Sony on pre-rendered Cinematics for a PS3 title. Im a contracting for them so I checked all the legal paperwork and its cool for me to still work on my own stuff provided im not working on my titles on site.

I updated my demo reel. I might be interested in taking more freelance or trading art assets for technology/coding. So drop me a line and well talk. No work for stock options or anything like that. I had enough of that during the dot com era. Hehe.

www.yanki.jp

I have two titles that I am making in TGB that I am hoping to have ready to show screens by Christmas. I have a third one ive been messing around with the code for but I need animated collision polys. I have it working but im a little afraid that since im updating it based on the frames of the animation and my game starts to skip frames then ill it wont register hits.

Im waiting to hear back from some of my friends that are helping me assemble the team that I want. Im contracting artists in Japan to help me with my work on one of the titles. The language barrier might be a little of an issue but my Japense has gotten better than the last time when I went drinking with Square/Enix friends in Tokyo.

P.s. If your in the LA area and want a Japanese arcade machine hit me a line. Hehe. Im selling my personal one to make space.

My E3 this year...

Juan Rubio — 2006-05-11T18:28:56+00:00

So my E3 has come and gone. I was only able to go for one day. My E3 was mainly to share the American game culture with a class of game programming students from Japan. Wow im tired. :)

I got there about 9:30. Registration was really painless and took me like 1-2 minutes to pick up my pass. Called the main guy who set up me being the tour guide and met them somewhere around Kentia hall. I thought it was interesting that the passes had to be shown under a UV light to make sure they were valid and not knock-offs. Overall security has been bumped up all around and I saw a fair amount of police walking around the floor. It was fun meeting the group of students and I felt a little old explaining to them about American arcade companies and old home systems. Its funny to see someone hold an atari 2600 cart for the first time. Hehe.

I showed them around the main floor. It was cool and gave them the spiel about what American companies were around and what they did when we went booth to booth. Even though they are gamers they dont know who most of these companies are. A lot of times a game will even be distributed by a total other company in Japan. (I.e. GTA was published under Capcom).

So the new generation seemed to be shaping up. There were some interesting products but nothing that I really "needed" to have. Tons of FPS's, tons of MMOs (actually tons of Korean games that are coming). There was a long line to Wii. :) so I skipped out. I played some games and it was funny that a Blizzard friend and I tried playing Battlefield 2142 and we had no idea what was going on at all. We were lost. Haha. Then a EA guy tries explaining the whole thing and we got even more confused. Haha. Nothing all that super exciting for me. There were a cpl games that looked nice and I liked the lighting/some of the FX on the newest Bandai Gundam game. Im happy to report booth babes were alive and well. They are a bit distracting though. Talking with some peeps about serious subject and then losing my train of thought because someone in a silly outfit is jumping all over the place. Hey! Im an artist. A visual person. I cannot be held at fault for that. :)

After I left E3 I went to Gardena to a hotel. I held a class along with a Japanese lady from Activision. We talked about development, art, coding, and did a bit of Q&A. These students were very smart and enjoyed talking about the differences between American and Japanese games and culture. I showed them Torque and TGB. They were rather impressed and I hope they pick it up. They all jotted down the GarageGames address and seemed very happy that I showed them around the toolset and some demos. After our goodbyes I ran off to an E3 party.

Pendulum Studios (great people btw), Softimage, Intel and the House of Moves had a "Where the booth babes are at" party. Hehe. It was a good party overall and im glad a group of my peeps came out for it. Free in and out burgers, dancing, open bar. It was a good night. Hehe. I closed the party at like 3:30 am. It was kind of sad to see some guys there just trying to hit on the hired help and our group. We were there and we just wanted to have fun. Hehe.

"The Game Programmers Guide to Torque" review.

Juan Rubio — 2006-04-19T18:24:13+00:00

Heyaz,

Yeah im probably late on the train of people who have been talking about the book. Im hoping this will help the stragglers pick up many copies. :)

Being between an artist and technical person(a Technical Artist the game biz calls us) this book really spoke to me. When I walked into the bookstore by my house I hit the magazines, art books, then computer books. In the Computer section I didnt really see anything and I was looking for the Torque Book. I was bummed when I didnt find it but then I turned around and saw a new release table with copies of the book in question. At first glance I just saw a lots of pages on Torque classes, Torque scripting, and some things on the hud. So I figured it be good reference so I grabbed it and ran home.

Well im super glad I bought it. Its a really deep book and it covers many things that I didnt even know were in Torque. As an Artist its super useful because its a lot easier to see whats going on under the hood. Its also given me some new ideas about how to go about my projects. The only thing that sucks is that its given me so much new info that I am going to start some of my projects over to take advantage of that info. :) Hehe.

One thing that usually peeves me about 3D and game coding books is the sheer amount of fluff. You usually have tons of pages of rehashed info (no really.. you dont need to explain what a polygon is). So im happy if I can walk away with one or two new bits of info out of a book. This Torque book is pretty fluff free. :) So the amount that ive learned from it has made my investment totally worth it.

Well time to go back to work. I also have one month to make a demo to show off Torque to the Japanese students coming to the states. :) Hehe.

Big in Japan/E3/Luck/Models/X-Men 3

Juan Rubio — 2006-04-08T00:49:07+00:00

Heyaz Y'allz,

E3 is coming up. I havent been to it in a bit because it seems to be more ghetto every year. I managed to miss GDC this year due to work so I figured id hit E3 to maybe run into friends. So it looks like im giving a presentation on creating cg and game stuff and giving a tour to a bunch of students from Japan.(My name is at the bottom.. hehe):

http://www.trident-com.com/new/e3.html

I mentioned to a bunch of students who were here like a couple months ago about Torque and Ill most likely give them a formal presentation on what I have going and my Maya to Torque pipeline progress. I gotta figure out the localization stuff to show them so they know they can kick stuff out in Japanese if they want.

Luck is good and sometimes bad. I was having the good life getting free VIP tickets to see Advent Children here in LA and then getting free VIP to watch the Clippers game the day after. Then boom. There are some issues with my car/loan and other things. So im liable for like 13k. I can get about 7k of that back after the fact but still it sucks. There goes my budget and what I was saving up for my visa to live in another country for a year doing nothing but indie game dev. Well see how things go so all is not lost.

Models. Female models. It looks like they are still being hired for E3 so itll be interesting to see if they are just wearing more clothes than usual. Ive see tons of postings looking for E3 girls locally here in LA. Im hiring some models myself to do some anatomy studies and actually use them to build my textures/3d models for characters. Should be fun since I havent been able to do this for my own projects and I have to come up with a pipeline for humans at work for a film so it goes hand in hand. :)

Well time for some images. IGN is talking about my sequence on X-Men 3 that I finished.
http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/697/697694p1.html
http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/691/691869p1.html

Im hoping right after E3 and my presentation ill be able to give some screens of personal work. It looks like crude right now but we all gotta start somewhere. ^_^

Lates and much luck y'allz!
Juan

Going from Pro to happily joining the minors... :)

Juan Rubio — 2006-02-04T13:01:58+00:00

Heyaz,

This is my first posting here. I am a Technical Artist on the Game side that has worked for Rockstar Games and I have done contracts through third parties for SCEA and EA. On the film side which is where I normally hang my hat and have spent the most time, I am a Technical Director with me mostly being geared towards Color and Lighting/R&D. My demo reel is at(note I am NOT looking to join a team or for work):

http://www.bad-wan.com/reel/juanreel2005.wmv

So whats with the subject? Well I just started on the film X-Men 3 and a new facility that I have not worked at before. One of the guys there was joking and stating "Yeah im hanging out here in the minors but im waiting for my big chance to go back to the majors... the big boys". Hehe. Now im happy to go the other way myself. The chance that I can break free and finally come out with my first indie title or two. Sure it be fun to go work at a big game shop again but if I am going to make less money than I do in film id rather:

1) Own my own IP.
2) Not slave away for hours on end to have someone else make a profit out of what ive spent hours on to build and probably get laid off as soon as it ships.

Now ive been checking out Torque and T2D for a while now off and on. Trying to finally make the plunge and get to a point of releasing something or two this year. I am soo impressed to see how far both Torque and T2D have come. I am estatic with both products and I hope to see more improvement this year! :)

It is true that as being in the minors you can do almost anything that can be done at a larger place. It all comes down to time and talent because the cash usually aint there. There are some things I miss about the larger shops which is kind of a roadblock for me when dealing with Torque. Its true I could build it out but by myself it would take ages. Ive gotten some progress on my own but here is some info on my biggest roadblocks.

1. An acceptable way of creating interiors and then getting that geometry back into my 3d app so I can do layout and get it all back into Torque. Both Quark and that other app thats out there dont seem entirely usable to me and I dont see any ways of getting the geo back into my 3d app.

2. Setting up my camera in my 3d app and being able to replicate it exactly in Torque.

3. Creating vertex or image based lightmaps in my 3D app and getting it back into Torque (even though if I can get #1 working im fine just setting up my light positions, parameters in my 3d app and let Torque or the Lighting Kit handle it.)

Now these are all things that are common from the tools that I have seen at the "major studios" and talking to people who I know that work for some shops since Ive left the gaming field. Personally for me its all about getting the tools setup so I can let artists be artists (myself included) and not have to deal with a lick of scripting and then being able to see exactly what they will be getting in engine as easily as possible.

So what have I done to help this? Well a while ago I wrote a level editor that writes out Mission files directly from maya. Why is this important? Well the last title I was on we could create the level geometry, light and texture the geometry, do layout and triggers, animate to camera for cinematics and game play all within a single package. This editor is a step in that direction. Now its creating my level geo/lighting/texturing is my big hangup. DTS's are great but issues start popping up when you try to use them to create your levels with them. My mission editor does this and tries it and even exports image based lightmaps that I hacked into Torque but this solution really doesnt work in the long run. So im going back to step one.

If anyone has any advice please let me know. It be nice to be able to create DIF's and get them back into Maya for layout somehow. Its just Quark is reaally painful for me to work in. I got brush based modeling methods working in Maya and exporting to working map files BUT texturing is still wierd and creating brush modeling tools and scripts for Maya is still a bit off.

Well onto the minors I say! Ill be happy when I make it in and have something shipping this year. My assets are sloooooooowly coming along. hehe.

Laters!
Juan Rubio