To totally go 3D-nerd, I thought I’d share some challenges and interesting things associated with this scene.  First of all, I tried with all my might to use displacement mapping for the cut stone on the first floor of the building, but mostly, it just crashed and made me angry.  I broke down and modeled the stone, and it looked five times as good and rendered in half the time.

Several years ago, we picked up a great package of 3D trees and shrubs from Xfrog – they’re really nice models, but they’re also really hard on a scene at render time, especially with any kind of indirect illumination calculation (in this case, Mental Ray’s Finalgather).  Thanks to some tips I picked up from one of  Jeff Patton’s master classes from Autodesk U a couple years back on exposure and lighting, I figured out that I could actually get large numbers of trees rendered out if I ran a Finalgather pre-pass with a flat-grey  material prior to running the final color pass.  Granted, it isn’t as physically accurate, but I decided that I’d rather have actually RENDER than to have nothing at all.  Here’s what that pre-pass looks like:

So, by the time I got all the 3D vegetation in along with the building, I had 29 MILLION polygons in the scene, which just a stupidly large amount.  Every scene and computer has a limit of what you can render in one shot, and I found it on this one.  Next time, I’ll be breaking it down into passes – I had to do some of that in the end to get it out and done.

So – fun image.  Nice to have something that isn’t all parking lot and has some perspective/vanishing point action happening.  This was a fun project to step back and really examine my workflow.  While my workflow isn’t perfect yet, it’s getting better and more methodical.

Fun stuff. This is a great example of finding the sweet spot of complexity and technical challenge, and blending it with the budget and timeline that the client has. We could have put 400% more time and budget into it, and gotten decent results, but the client wouldn’t have been able to afford it, and we would have had 100% less revenue from the project.

That being said, here is this nice little interior fly-through.

IHOPU Animation Proof02 from Ryan Tow on Vimeo.

Here’s some recent work. This is what I’d call a “bread and butter” rendering – knocked out in about twelve hours total, including some revisions with the client. Still chasing the right sky and grass tones. Had some grass I liked better, but the client asked for greener grass.

Another lesson on this one – dark browns are very, very tough to dial in.

Well, here’s a little audiovisual treat for you. I was looking for some files on one of our computers, and ran across a short video I made one day of that office. Enjoy.

I’m not really one to get into the whole “oooo, look at his blog post about subject X”, just to feel like a bigger part of the whole blogging experience, but you really should read Cracker’s posting about cats. Tell me how you roll, cat.

Travis made a query in a comment regarding some clarification about what the Hole Replacement Facility (HRF) is. I’m not so presumptuous to think I need an FAQ for my blog, so I’ll give the brief explanation that I haven’t given for quite some time. Three years ago, I moved from Branson, Missouri to Des Moines, Iowa. By some smooth talking, I was able to keep my job in Branson, but work in Des Moines. Follow? Well, I worked at home. In the basement. Cold, dark, very little light. This basement office promptly became known to me as The Hole. I spent a year in The Hole before moving the office to its current location, an actual office space known as the Hole Replacement Facility.

Landlord stopped by about 2 hours ago. Noted that our lease is up soon. Curious as to our plans. I stated that were hesitant to commit to another long lease on this space, since I wasn’t crazy about the location. I realized as I said this about the location, and saw his face, that I basically insulted his real estate sense for having purchased the building currently housing the HRF. In any case, I think we’re staying. Unless he wants a lot more money. In which case, I may start seeking an HRFRF.

Disc 8 is burning now. 56 minutes till the FedEx drop.

I lose my two internmonkeys today. They seem to think college is important. Time to jack up productivity.

There. Threw away the UPS envelope. That feels much better.

There have been some rumblings within my brain of moving the HRF to another location. You see, I don’t really like this location. The left turn on exit is a killer. It takes forever to get anywhere from here. In addition, they’re mere days from opening a full-on, free-standing Starbucks in the parking lot directly across the street from here. It even has a drive-through. Do you know what that drive-through could do to my economic stability? It just isn’t good.

The problem is, I hate moving. I really, really, really hate moving. So, I think that unless my landlord springs a new lease on me, I’m gonna hang out here for awhile. We may do some reconfiguring. Maybe that will make me feel better. I could look out the window and see Starbucks. Let it tease me. Yeah, that’s what I need.

I better go clean my desk .. . .

But its all good This space will, as every space I’ve ever lived in, fill in with random crap as I accumulate it. I’ve got some of my old stuff in already – if you peruse the links, you’ll see the standard-issue blogroll, as well as an archive link that will give you the contents of my old blogger.com blog from 2001-2003. I’m working on getting the other blog posts moved over here. Once I get it all worked out, I might even try and parse out the image links and fix all that as well.

I hired a guy for about $550 to shoot some video from a helicopter in Branson. After innumerable phone messages, I got the tape today. It looks like, in the words of my co-worker, it was shot by an epileptic third grader (apologies to any epileptic third-graders). I’m so bitter. I trusted this guy with a big part of this project, and now I look like a dork because he didn’t care enough to shoot this video correctly. People suck. Of course, I’m part of people.