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.

Meet redacted, unarguably the first employee of Timefire LLC. He’s been slogging away with me since last summer as we started learning just what might be required for us to make a compelling virtual reality environment that would not only entertain us but hopefully thousands of others, too.

He got his start in 3D and game engine authoring back in May 2011 upon replacing a computer he killed playing over 7000 hours of World of Warcraft. Little did he know that there was a free version of UDK (Unreal Developers Kit) and a student version of Autodesk’s 3DS Max. For the next two years, minus a serious pause to get deep into playing Star Wars – The Old Republic, he studied hard to teach himself the intricacies of some truly difficult software.

Midway through developing his 3D skills, I took him, Brinn, and Rainy (I knew them all through a local Starbucks where they all worked) with me to Anaheim, California, to attend Siggraph 2012. He wasn’t far into the convention center when he came upon Shapeways and discovered his first real “career” – 3D printed jewelry artist. With some coaxing, he opened his Etsy store, 3DPrintImagination. I say coaxing because, to some extent, this digital artist is a bit of a luddite; he’s horrible with social media, rarely checks email, and has to be pressured to participate in forums to ask questions that could help him.

Come May 2013, he asked if he could bring over a UDK level he’d been working on; he wanted to see it on my new Oculus Rift that I had just received. To say we were tripping hard would be an understatement. During the months waiting for the Rift, I was certain he was going to inherit this VR device, as “How for $300 was this thing going to be taken seriously?” After peering into the Rift, I had to let him know that there was no way I was parting with this piece of magic. We were both hooked now.

He would work on space stations, sky islands, and art installations so he could walk through them and into them in VR. This encounter with the Rift reignited his interest in UDK, which he’d been neglecting as he pursued his work in 3DS Max and 3D printed jewelry.

Today he has moved out of UDK into UE4, added deft Blender skills to his repertoire, leaving his beloved Max behind, and is ripping through Substance Designer. Through it all, he has been incredibly motivated to jump into authoring video games; it is that enthusiasm that sees him working sometimes up to 90 hours a week to realize his dreams. His dedication to seeing Timefire succeed is certainly an asset we couldn’t easily replace. He is our lead Unreal Engine developer.

After months of writing and promoting my blog titled PSOIH – www.psoih.com, also known as the Phoenix School of Optimism, Intellect, and Hope, I have to abandon it. The name just wasn’t jelling with people. I tried telling them that the “P” was silent and that the name read as “SOY” – but it just didn’t click. As far as traffic goes, well, that’s been doing great.

At some point in the near future, I’ll try to migrate the content over here to Timefire if time allows. Maybe it’s appropriate it should fade away, it was a reflection of my initial work in learning UDK (Unreal Developers Kit) and Blender, along with working with textures as bitmaps using Photoshop. Today, we are fully immersed in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), still using Blender, but we are now exploring procedural textures and the Physically Based Rendering (PBR) pipeline.

In the short amount of time building the first prototype VR environment for the Oculus DK1 (Developers Kit v.1), we have seen a world of change. To us, nothing will be the same as it was when we made our first exploratory lessons into virtual reality, as what is coming is beyond everyone’s imagination – except maybe those building this step into the future.

We are almost ready to tackle our objective of building some kick-ass Virtual Reality, but there are the hurdles of the unknown, unknowns of which some have been becoming known as time passes. There is much to do in order to build something as audacious as virtual reality. Knowledge is probably the biggest factor in proceeding with this endeavor, and we have to constantly check ourselves to verify if we have enough.

First, we have the gamut of hardware requirements. The computers we have built ourselves are based on Intel’s i7-4930k, 16GB of RAM (except one PC which needed 64GB of RAM – he’s the UE4 expert among us), EVGA GTX-780Ti’s, and some extraordinarily large 27″ Asus monitors that let us see a glorious 2560×1440 resolution each. We built them on open benchcases, so we are constantly reminded of the horsepower at our fingertips.

That’s not the only hardware we need. There is the matter of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, where we are allowed to peek into the immersive world of the virtual. Not only do we have a DK1 (Developers Kit ver. 1) that I acquired during their now-famous Kickstarter, but I also nabbed a prototype Oculus HD while at GDC back in March. Sitting on another desk is also a test unit from Microsoft of the Kinect 2, a Razer Hydra, a game controller, and some headphones that will allow us to hear sounds in the far away corners of the VR world we are building.

For software, we are exercising the low-budget muscles. Foremost among these tools is Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). It was at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco that Epic crushed the dreams of other game engine developers while inflating ours with a price of only $19 a month per seat instead of the stratospheric prices of yore that were so exorbitant they couldn’t even be spoken. Next up in our arsenal is the open-source and FREE 3D software known as Blender. Without Blender, we would be faced with tens of thousands of dollars for our mesh creation and animation tools. Instead, we have saved a substantial amount of money that is being better spent on payroll. Equally as important to our workflow is Allegorithmic’s suite of tools: Substance Designer and Substance Painter. While we are presently on hold regarding the lack of easy-to-use native support or a friendly-to-use plugin that ties together UE4 and Substance, we are patient, and in any case, we have so much mesh modeling ahead of us along with filling those knowledge gaps I spoke of, we can wait. Rounding out our toolkit are 3D-Coat, MakeHuman, and TerreSculptor.

Right now, we are only three people, but we have the ability to hire others. We have to hold off bringing in others as there’s a lot for us to do now that we are formally a company and not a hobby. One guy is digging hard into UE4 to better understand Materials, Blueprints, splines, and plugins, compiling our own versions, and staying up with the crazy openness of Epic and their new philosophy of sharing everything. Brinn, being relatively new to mesh modeling and Blender, is spending 80 hours a week mastering this half of his responsibility to our new company. His other task will be our soundtrack and audio work. Me, well I’m knee-deep in business affairs and working through the kinks of our funding, though I have to say that the financial group we have behind us is amazing and has surprised me with the speed they stepped up to make it all happen. Thanks, guys, and especially Jeffrey Rassas who lead these efforts.

The guy on the right that’s me, John Wise the Founder of Timefire. The woman with me is my wife, Caroline. Not only were we in Germany on the Danish border in part to celebrate my 50th birthday, but we were also only a month away from returning home and taking possession of an Oculus Rift. So, in a sense, this is the last time I had a “normal” photo taken of me, as life is now measured in B.O. and A.O. (not Body Odor and Ambient Occlusion – but as Before Oculus and After Oculus). I don’t think anyone with an imagination who has looked into the Oculus headset has come away from it untouched. For me, it was apparent that Virtual Reality was finally on track to do something big, but what I couldn’t know last May was just how much.

Almost a year ago, a friend and I started working on some experiments to see what things we built would look like in VR; we weren’t disappointed. While the first Oculus Rift headset had ginormous pixels and enough motion blur to make the most stoic queasy in minutes, it was easy to see that Palmer Luckey was onto something. So we started learning all we could about what might be entailed in building a Virtual Reality environment. We embarked on learning about low-poly and high-poly meshes. UV unwrapping was easy compared to our struggles with lightmaps, which seemed like evil magic that only wizards could master. Being noobs, we would have to learn all we could about the difference surrounding 256, 512, 1024, 2k, and 4k textures and how did these work as a “Texture Atlas?” Level of Detail is an important factor to game devs, Breaking Bad didn’t teach us anything about cooking up a good batch of LOD. How about terrain and plants? Well, how many ways to you want to learn about how to make either? We’ll also have to take a look at motion capture, animation, rigging, character development, lighting, weather, and a host of other functions before we begin to start feeling competent about authoring a game.

Just as we think we’re getting somewhere, events conspire to deliver a huge setback while simultaneously offering a springboard into the future. Seeing as much of what we were playing with was “practice,” when the game industry started to make these transitional moves we were witnessing, we didn’t have a lot to scrap. First up was ditching bitmap textures and learning to dance with the new kids on the block – procedural textures and Physically Based Rendering (PBR). In December, I took a road trip to Hollywood for the first meeting with the great minds of Allegorithmic. That night, I was introduced to the Alpha version of Substance Painter. The writing was on the wall; we were going through a monumental shift for the game developer; little did I know that this was just the tip of the iceberg.

After learning from Oculus that Valve Corporation was hosting Steam Dev Days the following month in Seattle, Washington, I took a shot and wrote Gabe Newell to inquire about gaining an attendance code that would allow me to register for the event. Within two days, I was in, and tickets and hotel reservations were made. Following Gabe’s keynote and the unsuccessful attempt to ask the guy a question, I followed the founder of Valve out to the lobby, where I had the opportunity to talk with him for a few minutes. This was my lucky 50th birthday year; Gabe took me over to the “Booth” – the VIP room where a small handful of lucky industry people would get to be witness to the work Valve had been doing on their own VR headset. Standing there, I was introduced to Michael Abrash, Tom Forsyth, and Atman Binstock. It was Atman who led me through the demo. OMG, this VR is amazingly tear-inducingly overwhelming.

Then, in March, another shoe dropped in the cascade of events that convinced me it was time to take action; Epic released Unreal Engine 4 at the incredibly low price of only $19 a month, and it was available to everyone immediately. Oh, that and Oculus showed Developers Kit v.2, which was utilizing some of the magic that Valve was sharing with them. In retrospect, it is obvious why Mark Zuckerberg would be so blown away by the technology that he would have to buy Oculus. It would also be that pivotal moment following GDC in March that would have me recognizing I would have to transition from a hobby project to a serious company armed with the right tools and staffing to be able to deliver a compelling story and environment.

And so Timefire was born.

My previous work includes active participation in the German beginnings of Techno music and bringing the first 3D computer graphics to the European continent. Along the way, my interest in communication and video arts saw me working with Nirvana (1989), The Sugarcubes (Bjork 1988 and 1989), Henry Rollins, Psychic TV, The Pixies, Nitzer Ebb, and many others. Upon my return to the United States after a 10-year extended sojourn, I opened one of the first 25 Internet Cafes on Earth in Scottsdale, Arizona, before moving between various tech companies, culminating with my initiative to build the world’s first sub-quarter million-dollar clustered supercomputer with Jeffrey Rassas – a current partner and the guy who has lead the fundraising that is allowing us to compete in building what we hope will be a viable and interesting VR platform. My current interest in VR was originally born over 20 years ago when the expense and poor quality limited anyone from making a serious attempt at bringing the technology to the masses. Today, those limitations have been removed, and the world is about to undergo a fundamental and profound shift as we are thrust into the FUTURE.