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.

Maybe.

Its been a rough 18 months or so in our business. That’s not really revolutionary information, seeing as we’re pretty heavily tied to real estate development. Tracking things back to about October 1, 2008, our workload pretty much shut off as if someone had cranked down a faucet. I haven’t wanted to write much about it, well, because it isn’t very much fun to talk about. I’m guessing that if I were to graph the number of things I’d written in general over the last five years, there’d be a pretty substantial drop right at about that time.

But today is the day. Today is the day that it turns around. The turnaround is less about how many projects are walking in the door, less about how I feel about things, less about whether the day is a win or a loss. Today is the day that I realize that after a year or more of uncertainty about the future of our company, the one thing I am certain of is that God has provided for my family precisely what we needed the entire time. Remember the Lord’s prayer? “Give us this day, our daily bread” – That’s precisely what we’ve experienced as a company – and ever month we’re able to keep things going is a win.

The thing is, regardless of the situation, regardless of the feeling about the circumstance, you still have to soldier on. There’s been some pretty good temptation to be a quitter, to give up. No way.

That’s about all I’m hopefully ever going to say about where things are, work-wise. Today’s the day I’m done worrying about it.

Today is the day that I start writing again. Feels good.

Time to clean my desk.

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.

I remember when I got a chain letter in about 1985. It seemed like a good idea. It was novel, if only to see where you might get responses back from. Turns out, nobody wanted forwarded messages in 1985 either.

In case you’re having trouble distinguishing between the vital pieces of information that friends forward to you (there is an entire discussion wrapped around whether friends even use the forward button in their mail client, but . . .another day) and those pieces of inspirational informational spiritual political satirical mail that fill your inbox, here are some things to look for, when trying to decide if its worth your time.

1. Background images. Really? Flowers?
2. 65 pt Comic Sans and other typographic atrocities
3. Enough email addresses and names in the various chains of forwards to start your own direct mail company
4. FW:(FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:)[FW:MUST READ]FWD:
5. Keywords: Bush, Obama, Lucky, Prayer, Funny, Interesting

On and on.

That forward button? The one you’re thinking about using? don’t do it.

This took pretty much all the kids had, in terms of good behavior. By the end, we were reverting to the “smile or you’ll be punished” method of taking pictures. The thing is, how did families get PAINTINGS of their kids 200 years ago? To get a kid to sit still long enough to be painted? No wonder nobody was smiling.

We had to promise the kids we wouldn’t do it again for a long time.

Nobody likes having their pictures taken. Everyone likes seeing the pictures.

I’m not sure whether its because I’m bored, depressed, or just out of stories, but I haven’t really felt like writing much lately.

In any case, starting today, I’ve got a new home. In classic egomaniaical style, I’ve moved to my own name as my domain. Don’t count on the content getting any better.

So, lets call this about the fourth reset of my personal blog/site since late 2000. Nine years ain’t bad.

HTTP://WWW.MYDL.ME

Oh, how I would love a Drobo. My artwork could be safe(r), and honestly, anything that adds more of Das Blinkenlights is fine by me.