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Interview with Diego Garcia
Pipeline Engineer at Blur Studio, Diego Garcia talks about Gentlemen's Duel, the challenges of data exchange between different packages, the cg inudstry and XSI.
November, 17th, 2006, by Raffael Dickreuter, Bernard Lebel
 |  | Diego Garcia, Pipeline Engineer at Blur Studio.
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Tell us what kind of education you have and how you got started in the cg industry
I remember that one day, at the age of seven, my father came home with a Christmas present, something similar to a box that you could connect to the old TV and you could see letters and graphics on the screen, it was a Vic-20 commodore computer, the begginning of the personal computer era in Spain. Every week I would run to the kiosk to buy the computer magazine, type all the code written in those pages just to be able to play a new game.
You could say I am self educated in computers, there was not a lot of information about them in Spain at that time, so the only option was to learn by yourself. In fact, in high school I was the one teaching programming to the class instead of the teachers that new almost nothing about it ( obviously in return for an A+ grade ).
With my poor English and an 'educational' copy of 3dstudio 2.0 ( DOS ), I slowly began to learn 3D working for a small company in Madrid called Charmed in 1994.
My first serious job in the CG industry came in 1996, when I started working as a modeler for REM Infografica. Specifically, I worked on the 'REM 3D Models Bank', that consisted on more than 1200 high resolution models, architecture, vehicles, aircraft, humans, etc ...
At that time I was also studying Mathematics at university and realized the need for tools to make processes easier for the artist, so when I had the chance, I switched from the modeling department to the R&D department, where we developed commercial plugins for 3DStudio Max ( Reyes plugins ) and tools to help the production of CG TV series.
After almost 6 years working in Spain, I moved to England to work for Eurocom Entertainment Software, an independent video games developer. I learnt a lot from the way video games optimize their data to deliver real time frame rate. Also started to develop the 3dsmax pipeline and tools used in games production. During that time I worked on interesting videogames like Batman Begins, Robots, Predator, Sphinx, Athens 2004 ...
And finally, one day I received an email from Blur Studio's saying that they wanted me to work as a Pipeline and Tools developer for them, and here I am, It has been almost two years working for this great studio, trying to put my 2 cents to the amazing work that the artists create here everyday, and trying to make their lives easier.
Can you describe to our readers what is the job of "pipeline engineer"?
My job as Pipeline Engineer at Blur consists of improving the overall performance of the production, design, implementation and development of tools to enhance the existing capabilities of the studio. Also, as tool developer, I'm responsible for the creation of core libraries common to many of our tools, and to assist and solve the artists production problems and daily issues as they arise.
Tell us a bit about the culture of working at Blur Studio and its gaming aspect
Blur Studio is a lot different to other companies I have worked for in the past. The first thing that you notice when you enter the door is the layout of the studio, We are all in the same big open plan lounge, this helps a lot with communication between departments, there is no one hiding in a room, not even the bosses. Also the company is driven by artists, there is a lot of freedom that helps the creativity, some people decide to work at nights, some people come early in the morning, of course only if the schedules allow to do so. At the end I find the little details to be more important than you initially think, they take care of the employees, although I think they should take away the sweets and chocolates or I won't stop eating !
Gentlemen's Duel
What kind of projects does Blur Studio usually do?
Game cinematics, commercials, CG ride films, and some VFX, but Blur's goal has always been to make animated feature films.
Tell us about the production process of Gentleman's Duel
At Blur we have a short film ideas contest that we do almost every year. It consists of people working in the studio who can submit their ideas, and if your's is chosen, you get to write the script and direct the whole short film. It is pretty cool that the studio give us this oportunity, someone could end up winning and award or being nominated for an Oscar, like what happened with Gopher Broke a couple of years ago.
Gentleman's Duel was in production for almost a year and a half, from the initial idea to the end. However, not all the stages of the project required the same amount of people to be involved. At the beginning it was mostly the director and writers polishing the idea and script, at the same time Concept Design would give us the first look into what the world would be like and the characters involved in the short. By the beginning of spring, Layout took over and started to define every shot and plotting the action that would take place within each scene. Modeling and Rigging were both spread during the summer, and finally Animation, FX, lighting and compositing were done during the last three months and a half of the project.
I have to say that at the same time Blur was involved in several other projects, game cinematics and commercials primarily, it was pretty impressive to see the dedication and hard work of everyone at the studio to deliver the project on time to qualify for the Oscars.
What were the most challenging aspects of your work for this project?
Blur has been traditionally a 3dsMax house but, at some point two years ago, we realized that we were reaching the limits of this software with our rigging pipeline. We started to look for other solutions and it turned out that XSI suited our needs perfectly. We also could count with the help and support of SoftImage Special projects which happens to be just around the corner from the studio.
Gentleman's Duel was the perfect project to start the transition to XSI, so the most challenging aspect for the tools team was precisely changing the whole Animation and Rigging pipeline to XSI. We had around 6 months to make it happen and production would be happening at the same time we were working on it... Also, for all of us it was the first time we programmed tools for XSI and we had to make sure animators and riggers would have the same set of tools that they were used to before when they were working in 3dsmax.
Explain some of the tools you wrote for this production
Apart from writing some core libraries needed for our tools, and since our render pipeline is all 3dsmax, we needed some kind of tool that would transfer the animation back to that package. For that purpose I wrote the 'Point Cache' plugin for XSI, that if you are familiar with point oven, it works in a very similar way. The tool bakes the position of each vertex into a cache file that would be read afterwards by a similar plugin inside 3dsmax. I also developed the 'Transform Cache' plugin for XSI, which basically does the same as the point cache one, but instead of exporting vertex positions it exports only the position, rotation, scale information of each node, this was used by all the elements that were rigid and didn't deform during the animation.
The cool thing about these plugins was that scene assembly were referencing the cache files from animation, so if the animator changed the animation in XSI for one shot it would automatically reflect the same changes into the 3dsmax scene assembly file.
What kind of assets do you exchange between XSI and 3ds max?
Blur's mixed pipeline consists of: modeling and scene assembly are done within 3dsmax, and layout, rigging and animation are done into XSI. ( the role of the scene assembler at Blur consists of bringing the assets that come from animation into a new scene, light it, setup and render the passes, and create the final composition of the shot ) So it is between modeling and rigging, and animation and scene assembly when we have to make sure the assets are exchanged properly. For the first one we export our models to XSI using primarily dotXSI format , and for the second one we export only point animation back to 3dsmax.
Gentlemen's Duel
Are there proprietary exchange tools between XSI and 3ds max, or is it done all through commercial technology?
Both, for transferring the information between animation and scene assembly we wrote our own tools, point cache and transform cache tools that I explained before, and for bringing the models to XSI we use dotXSI format although now we are exploring other options like FBX, COLLADA, etc...
How do you ensure the sanity of assets across data exchange?
Naming conventions are the key, we use the same naming convention between 3dsmax and XSI and we have developed tools to help artists to use those conventions. Also every department has it's own Quality Control process to make sure they deliver the assets in the right way to the next stage of the pipeline.
Gentlemen's Duel
What are the most complex aspects of such a mixed pipeline?
From an artist point of view it is definitely getting used to the new tools and new work environment, for example, animators loved the XSI curve editor but they missed a lot the 3dsmax timeline functionality.
For a programming point of view, managing and supporting different 3d packages is doubling the amount of work, each one has it's own philosophy, and having to write tools in so many different languages sometimes make you loose track of where you are.
What programming language(s) do you use for the pipeline tools?
3dsmax: Maxscript, C++
XSI: python, pyQT, javascript, C++
Pipeline general and IT tools: QT, python, perl, C++
What do you think are strong points of XSI?
In general XSI feels more consistent than other packages, it almost never crashes, it is efficient with large amount of data, modular, and everything works with everything, a new feature is the same well integrated than the old ones. References is another strong point of this package, with the new delta referencing in XSI 6.0 it will allow pipeline developers to overlap the processes even more, with the amount of time and money saved that represents. And for SoftImage as company, it is just the fresh ideas that they have ( Face Robot, GATOR, MOTOR ) , they are willing to listen and help their users, and that they are open to work with different packages like 3dsmax or Maya.
Which areas should be improved?
One of the areas I haven't gotten used to is the UI programming, It seems to me that is a bit limited, everything has to be gray or you have to develop some kind of hybrid application using the netview. That is why we have taken a look at other alternatives like QT or pyQT. It would be nice if it were possible to create your own native UI controls, treeviews, spinners, etc ... Also, since we use it as our main scripting language, I'd like to see more integration between python and XSI, for example, at the moment we develop our custom operators in Javascript or C++ because of evaluation efficiency.
From the artist point of view, I think it is well known that XSI lacks a robust particle system ( although from what they say on their website it seems they are working on it )
Compare working in Spain and Europe to working in the United States
United States has indeed a much more mature CG industry than Europe, although I think that, in general, there is more creativity in Europe than here. A mix between both would be perfect, from one side the level of specialization that is here is needed to achieve quality results, and from the other, good and fresh ideas drive good results too.
I know it sounds typical, but the thing that I usually miss the most is the food, we have so much interesting food in the old continent than here... serrano ham, where is it ??
FOXNFL - Thinking about the pipeline...
Whats your advice on a young developer who would like to work at a studio like Blur one day?
In this case I think it is a bit different than for artists. I would recommend to learn the 3d package from inside out, even to be a user before becoming a programmer, if possible. Only knowing the limitations as a user, you will really know what is useful to improve as a programmer. Also, working day by day closely with artists and for artists will always give you broader perspective of what is needed.
Related Links
Blur Studio
Diego Garcia
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