Rubén Barrocal, 3D animator and Unreal Engine Technical Artist

The early years

I trained as a 3D animator at Keyframe between 2012 and 2014 and started working freelance right after. Those were years of high volume and a lot of variety: the series Conni and Niloya, the web series Pet Parade, a commercial for Movistar+, the film Heriberto y Demetrio and several other projects with studios such as B-Water and USER T38.

International series and games

In 2016 I joined Zinkia to animate the fourth season of Pocoyo. The next year came Game of Thrones: at El Ranchito I animated White Walkers and skeletons that digitally replaced the actors in season 7, matched to the costumes and the movement of the original plate.

That same year I moved to Glasgow with Axis Animation for the first season of Happy!, and came back for the second one in London. After that I joined Sumo Digital as a gameplay animator on Sackboy: A Big Adventure, working on the final boss and several NPCs.

Leading a team

Between 2022 and 2023 I put together and led a freelance team to produce marketing cinematics for Plarium’s Raid: Shadow Legends and Mech Arena, from start to finish. It was the first time I ran a whole production, from brief to delivery, and not just my own animation work.

Moving into real time

Around the same time I took part in two Epic Games Fellowships: Storytelling in 2022, focused on Sequencer and on setting up a proper production pipeline in Unreal Engine, and Animation in 2023. They were the push I needed to bring what I knew as an animator into real-time production.

Since 2024 I’ve worked at MR Factory (Mediaset España / Telecinco) as an Unreal Engine Technical Artist and animator: rigging and Control Rig, VFX, materials, functional Blueprints and integration with broadcast systems for augmented reality and virtual sets. Live TV doesn’t wait for anyone, so problems have to be solved fast and well. I wrote more about it in how I went from 3D animator to Technical Artist.