LightWave Case Study:Christo Smit, Virtualscape Visualizations (South Africa)

Transcription

1 LightWave Case Study:Christo Smit, Virtualscape Visualizations (South Africa) These guys have to qualify for the fastest LightWavers in the South with the creation of websites devoted to housing estates completed within two weeks. We speak to Christo Smit about just how it's done. Tell us a bit about yourself. Christo Smit, born in Johannesburg South Africa. After school I started studying process Engineering at Pretoria. The University, through a series of aptitude tests sent me to go and study another direction, as my "technical" abilities were somewhat overshadowed by boredom in the field. They sent me to go and study some "Multimedia" course at a private institution called The Open Window school of Visual Communications. It's there that I first got introduced to 3D animation and where I first saw LightWave. I finished the Degree course there as the Best Overall Final Year Student, Best 3D Animation Student, and got the Adobe award for outstanding design. Thereafter I started Virtualscape Visualizations. When did you first start using LightWave? Only in the second year of study. They had us start on 3ds max for the first year. What do you like about the package? Two things. Firstly was the lack of gimmicky icons, and secondly the fact that I could generate a realistic outcome without having to load another 3rd party plug-in. What could be improved for you? Not much, maybe a foot spa with each licence? The foot spa idea is intriguing and something we have considered for a while... hahaha! What is your role at Virtualscape? 1. Managing director of operations 2. Hands-on involvement for quality purposes 3. Product development (both existing products and what the industry requires) 4. Texturing and Lighting (of some projects if the office is swamped)

2 What spec machine(s) are you using it on at the moment? Pentium 4-3Ghz with 2Gb Ram Some or the other Nvidia graphics toy Oh... I've got 2 flat panel screens (which I can go without but don't want to). What makes having two screens worth holding onto? They keep my neck from spasming, and one screen reminds me of the early days, long nights, cold coffee and real nightmarish deadlines. ;) Are there any plug-ins you wouldn't be without? Fprime because it gives me real time feedback on what the heck I'm doing. Apart from FPrime, do you find you need any other plug-ins? How do you do your trees and grass for instance? Nope, that's the beauty of LightWave. No need for an Inferno plug just to do fire - Hypervoxels are great for that and so forth. Grass - merely a texture which we "grow" on the side of buildings in Photoshop. Trees... well, depending on the application. With stills we'll got with alpha maps and with motion we'll use 3D plant models. I kinda don't like the latter. In your opinion, should LightWave 3D stay separated or become integrated? SEPARATED most definitely! Primary reason is that I've got departments running this side dedicated to either modelling and texture/lighting. Let's not confuse the kids. It works great. What are you working on now? Hmmm... Currently Misty Creek - Hotel and day spa in the Mountains (Architectural project) 2. Eastwoods - Pub and Grill interiors (Interior decoration project) 3. Mount Lyric Multi-housing scheme (Developer project) 4. Morning Mist - Speculation house for sale (Developer project) 5. Ellerines - Air conditioning installation (Informational) 6. Øistensgate Multi-storey complex (Estate agent rentals) 7. Floorplans - Ongoing 3D floorplans for Norwegian company

3 Why use LightWave for all these projects? I feel the company has a competitive advantage due to imagery that is more rich and realistic. In this market a visual breach between built and yet-to-be--built products (concept or tangible) determines the sale. LightWave allows us to generate these images through its superior rendering quality. What's the average turnaround time for a flat? Exteriors? Around 10 hours from concept to deliver (if all specs are received on time) Interiors? Typical interior setting incorporating Kitchen, Dining & Living setting... Around two full production days (including rendering time) Who are your main clients? Is it architects, estate agents or someone else? Regular clients: Architects Lucrative clients: Property developers Tell me the process of "virtualscaping" a property? 1. Inception: Formal meeting with client to find out requirements. 2. Proposal: Based on budget and target audience we present the most logical project based outcome for the client. 3. Organizational: All head animators in each department (Modelling/Texture Lighting/Post production/customer Liaison) sit down and discuss the process and what is required of each department and when the outcome is needed. 4. Modelling: After the base model is built, we send out what we've branded as "greys". These are untextured models that supply the client with a template to indicate texturing and other specifications. Also a good time for them to make design changes. After this has been signed off we reach a design "freeze". 5. Texturing: All texturing to be done according to specifications. Placement of the unit on the specified site and implementation of all secondary attributes (according to client specification). 6. Preliminary phase: This phase might take up to two rounds depending on the client specifications. We go back and forth between the client and tweak the outcome to satisfy the client's requirements. 7. Post production: All images or sequences to be rendered for the post production department. They do all the relevant applications and design for whatever the marketing campaign requires.

4 Are the properties only in SA? No, we've done work in Bazaruto, UK, US, and our biggest off-shore client is a company in Norway. Did you do a traditional arch viz for the Norwegians? It's more of a booking system for the vacant apartments. It incorporated visualizations and the "blueprints" product. People can go to the website, have a look at the apartment and book it from there? Yep, considering the weather conditions in Norway, displaying a show house in the property market is not always feasible. Hence this result was generated more out of a need than a want. Is there anywhere we can see a virtual tour? We have done virtual tours in the past, however we feel they become fairly tedious and there are better and more cost-effective ways of communicating the interior of a property. If a client requires something like that we would rather move towards an "advertisement" type clip (round sec) to illustrate the "benefits" of this project or development. We've had quite a lot of success with these. Some of the work we've actually stitched cube faces together using Panoweaver and then displayed on the site, but mostly it's just stills presentations and in some cases we make PDF downloadable documents for the buyers to download Here's an example of a site we've made. This was a development with 36 units that they wanted to sell off plan. There you can see a combination of the Visualizations, and the Blueprints. How much of this does Virtualscape do? The LightWave images of course, but the Flash work? The PDFs? All of it. We have an in-house design facility, actually a sister company in-house, called CG Labs And for Homestead, for example, how long was the turnaround? Entire project, from concept to Viz to Design and implement,... hmm... about two weeks (but three would also have been nice. We re at the end of the proverbial food-chain and turnaround times are almost always hectic). Wow, how many folk working on it? Two on modelling, one on blueprints, one on texturing, two on design, and a helluva lot of rendering behind it.

5 ...and just how do you get them to do two weeks of 25-hour days? hehehe, no we try and get some sleep some time. We've one guy in the office that just handles the traffic. The typical working day is no longer than 10-hour shifts. We do however have a day and evening shift happening, so the company pretty much runs 20 hours a day That must take some seriously military-style organisation. No wonder you want to keep Layout and Modeler separate! This was the only solution to a very demanding market. Does the speed of LightWave make a difference to your work? LightWave allows us to work at such a rate and is a low enough cost per seat to allow us to significantly undercut competition around the world. With such a tight turnaround, do you use radiosity? Yup, most of the time, we find it takes less time to just get into rendering than trying to fake it, however, radiosity isn't something that should take that long. we've found some formulas that really give a great result and work quite quickly Exteriors are always going to be fine anyway, but don't interior shots pose problems for your deadlines? Especially with multi-bounce radiosity? The dining room image, rendered at print resolution had four area lights, seven spots, one point light and three bounces... It took about 12 hours to render. Renders sometimes end off a bit grainy but programs like Neat Image were invented for that purpose. With such a lot of rendertime within a deadline do you do all rendering in-house? No, if we have large sequences we need done, we've recently started an affiliation program with a UK-based rendering company called Render-IT, so we kinda make it their problem. With the stills, well, there's not many ways around it - one machine, one image, hold thumbs and see what it looks like tomorrow. Is your head modeller your brother? Yeah, he used to work for TBWA (ad agency) as an art director. about a year ago I asked him whether he would like to join our team as a good visual is more than just clever 3D tricks. I think it paid off. Thanks for chatting with us Christo and we'll keep you posted on the foot spa issue. Everyone should have a look at the example site Christo posted us to, and also Virtualscape's own website