John Wise

From time to time, I’ll offer a glimpse into our workflow and what we’re working on. This particular Wednesday morning, redacted, has been working primarily in Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer on some scaffolding elements. By no means can he really work exclusively in one piece of software, and so he has Blender, Photoshop, and Unreal Engine open simultaneously. Lucky him, his PC has 64GB of RAM paired to an Intel i7-4730k, a GTX 780Ti, and two Asus 27″ 2560×1440 monitors, so he has plenty of horsepower and screen real estate to easily move between programs. With redacted primary responsibility being Unreal Engine authoring, the extra RAM comes in handy during the worst part of redacteds week, when he has to build lighting for our environment.

At another desk in our office, Dani is learning about Adobe’s Illustrator program. For the next week, she’ll be immersed in that and Photoshop. After nearly two months of working in Blender daily, actually nearly seven days a week since the end of May, she’s proficient enough with mesh building and UV unwrapping that it was time to have her teach herself about the next two programs she’ll have to master. This is her first design in Illustrator; her next will be a dung ball based on Brinn’s profile.

After a quick refresher in Blender following his Italian holiday, Luis is diving into a great big complex addon for Blender called Sverchok. A year ago, I would have called this a Russian program, but since then, a number of people from around the world have jumped in to help Nikitron, including indispensable help from Jimmy Gunawan from BlenderSushi, who has thoroughly tested Sverchok and made countless recommendations. Sverchok is Russian for “Cricket.” It is greatly influenced by “Grasshopper” for the 3D modeling program Rhino in that it, too is a parametric tool for architects and designers. For us, this software needs to tie in with plans that include After Effects, Trapcode Particular, Plexus, and Touch Designer, all wrapped up in a tight VR world.

The moment the entire office has been waiting for: The Oculus DK2 Virtual Reality headset has arrived in the office of Timefire VR in sunny and hot Scottsdale, Arizona. Like nearly everyone else who has been receiving their new Rift over the past few days, we were not without slight glitches. We are using the DK2 in conjunction with Unreal Engine 4, and it was just about a week ago that Epic released version 4.3, which is WORKING with our new gear! To fix the hiccups we ran into only required us to plug, unplug, and plug again all the cables from HDMI to USB and the power. Then, in an instant, we weren’t expecting anything different than what we were getting; the Oculus turned on, and so did we. No recompiling any demos for us; we have our own world to explore, and that’s just what we did for the next two hours 🙂

Meet long lost (on vacation in Italy, more specifically) the newest member of the Timefire team, Luis Chavez. Luis just got back to us yesterday after starting his new job with a two-and-a-half-week trip to Venice, Rome, Florence, Napoli, Pisa, and Milan, to name a few of the places he hung out. I’ll post more about Employee #6 in the next few days.

Over the course of two hours, everyone showed up at the office today; this is the first time the entire crew has been to work on Sunday. Redacted is working between Unreal Engine 4 and Substance Designer, while Brinn is finishing some final UV unwrapping touches on an architectural piece in Blender. Dani is trying to bring closure on a quick Blender mesh she’s putting together of an organic piece, and Ariana is taking her first steps into 3D-Coat this afternoon. Rainy (pictured above) has been working on learning Allegorithmic’s Substance Painter. With not a lot of tutorials, she’s been forced to scour other sources, like she’s doing here at Polycount’s website. Tomorrow I’ll have her teaching Dani what she’s learned so far.

Rainy, I mean Ray Knee, aka Ginger Davenport, is employee #3 – right? With this photo, you might start thinking I’m hiring people with issues. Well, you’d be wrong; they were simply all former baristas. Now, I’m not an expert on barista culture, and for all I know, they do all have issues, but that’s not relevant to this hire. Coming in on the lucky day of Friday the 13th, Raynee walked away from Starbucks and joined the ranks of artists at Timefire.

So, what’s the obsession with hiring baristas? Good question and one I don’t really have an adequate answer for. Maybe it was my sympathy for watching them steam their souls out of existence in an effort to make another damned venti-iced-cappuccino with eight packets of sugar and light whip during half-price happy hour while John Legend sucking the remaining life out of their limp bodies – well, that’s how I remember seeing Reignee day-in and day-out.

Ginger wasn’t just some barista mind you, this woman came out of a hippy-drenched sci-fi clad jewelry making Euro-exploration that had her on a trajectory that was colliding with 3DS Max, Photoshop, Gimp, a dabble into HTML and an interest unrivaled with 3D Printing, and how it could change her analog crafting skills into a 3D mastery of Digi-craft.

After witnessing the barista redacted, making the transition to Blender God, Radium decided that she would become a Blender Goddess, and so she embarked on a quest to put her “Espresso pulling hand” into retirement so she could better strengthen her mouse grip instead. She toiled and contorted herself between the endless hours of coffee servitude to master this 3D beast that might one day offer her salvation. It would take weeks, even months, before she would be able to show me enough progress that I would start to consider Rainier for a position with us.

Today, Raindeer is fitting right in with this motley crew, and with enough time, she just might be okay. By the way, her cat’s name is Slutty Pants – right?

Back on March 20th at the Game Developers Conference, better known as GDC, our guy redacted had the good fortune to meet Palmer Luckey – the founder of Oculus. I’d like to tell you that the guys are now hanging out, and we’re getting all the inside news regarding developments in VR headset gear, but that just wouldn’t be true. This was our first opportunity to attend GDC, and it couldn’t have been better. Our first stop during the conference was at the Oculus booth so we could be first in line to try the DK2, and that’s exactly where we were first in line!

Had we known what to expect from Epic, we’d have been hard-pressed to choose where to be the first morning of GDC. We were out of the Oculus booth maybe 20 minutes after arriving and had already tried both Couch Knights and Eve: Valkyrie – we were feeling the privilege. By the time we’d gotten around the corner to Epic’s booth, there it was writ larger than life, but it didn’t register even a little bit that the price and information we were seeing had anything to do with the Unreal Engine. It took a real Unreal person to get it through our heads that not only was Epic announcing UE4, but it was also available RIGHT NOW and for only $19 a month – TO ANYONE! This was overwhelming news. We recognized that the greatest game engine ever was being unleashed on everyone for a price that everyone could afford. Like the t-shirts worn by some of the reps said, “$#!T Just Got Unreal.”

The next stop was with some people that are starting to feel like friends – Allegorithmic. Not only did we make the effort to visit them in Hollywood back in December, but I’d also run into Alexis Khouri and Jeremie Noguer at Steam Dev Days in January, and now here we are in March, seeing even more of the crew. The night before, we went to a get-together sponsored by Allegorithmic that pulled together some of the key people working with the Substance suite of tools; for some reason, redacted, and I were invited. To be honest, we’ve been on point with feedback following our testing of alpha and beta versions of their products, so I guess a free burger on the guys was in order. This was also our second encounter with the CEO of Allegorithmic, Sebastien Deguy, and Dreamworks concept artist Gee Yeung. If only we understood on these days how important FMOD Studio was going to be to our products we would have spent more time with them; blew that one.

Being in the right place at the right time. There we were, standing at the corner of the Sony booth minutes before the GDC floor was going to open to the general public, when someone said, “You’d better get in line around the corner if you want one of the 650 tickets Sony is giving out to try the Morpheus VR headset they are debuting.” redacted nor I needed to think two seconds about that before we were charging in the wrong direction for the line. When we got to the correct corner, there were already about 80 people lined up for one of the coveted tickets; we had no problem scoring one for each of us. Our tickets were stamped for an 11:00 a.m. demo, and promptly at 11:00, we showed up and were soon immersed in a shark tank, followed by another demo of Eve: Valkyre. There was no denying that the Sony experience was within a few degrees of quality of the Oculus Rift, which adds to the verification that VR is definitely on its way.

Earlier during the Conference, we’d seen Cymatic Bruce trying the Virtuix Omni. The Omni is an omnidirectional treadmill-like device that will allow players of various VR games to run, walk, jump, and crouch to allow greater realism in their VR experience. Later in the day we ran into him on the floor and took a minute to talk things Virtual. He was just coming from his encounter with the guys from Razer and STEM. Redacted, and I had met with them the night before. Cymatic is certainly one of the strongest proponents of VR out there and has introduced many of us to some Oculus demos we’d have otherwise missed as we work crazy hours to create our own environments.