Alright, here we are at the Revit Technology Conference in sunny Wollongong, Australia! The pre-conference event has begun: the first ever VizDay, a day that concentrates on rendering and visualization, primarily with V-Ray and mental ray.
Lon Grohs of Chaos Group is up first, showing us the start of a remarkably delicate video created entirely by rendering software, "The Third & the Seventh" by Alex Roman. See figure below.
Mr Grohs is giving us an overview of the progress of rendering, from the unbearable 2000s when you had to set up all lights "manually". After showing us an animated clip made with Lightworks ray tracing from back then, he said it a painful to watch, because of all of the work required to set up scenes. "V-Ray saved us just in time," he declared. Well, that's because Chaos Group writes the V-Ray software. Now he is showing us a 6-million polygon interior view of a restaurant, which would not be possible with ray tracing.
"In the old days, walkthroughs and flythroughs were so cold, so emotional-less. We had to add a character or other effects to add warmth." So now we see a video that integrates a realistic looking woman enjoying her new apartment in Las Vegas, along with moving sunlight, opening flowers, dripping faucets (aren't those illegal yet?), and clouds passing by.
Here is a screen grab from another architectural project, rendered by V-Ray:
A number of movies were rendered with V-Ray, such as X-Men and Tron.
In the future, we can expect real-time rendering, an easier rendering where no training is needed.
Because we are in Australia, there are no "coffee" breaks, but tea breaks. First one is now!
Break over, and it's time to don the 3D glasses, as we watch a 3D rendered movie made by the design firm FloodSlicer of the next speaker, Daniel Flood. He's talking about Immersive Visualization, and the the sample video is on a 7-minute loop, while the music is on a 12-minute loop, so that viewers get a different experience, depending on when they start watching/listening.
Watching 3D video during VizDay.
He's describing some of the problems of making 3D videos. For example, the blur effect does not work well, motion has to be slower than in 2D, and so on.
Next up is Pat Carmichael from HKS, speaking about the free Unreal gaming engine for dealing with extremely large data sets. "In Dallas right now," he jokes, "the best way to find an architect is to call, 'Oh, waiter...'!"
The same technology that works with game engines works well with point clouds. The idea is to get a building model in CAD, and so they can do something as huge as a stadium from scan to CAD model in three days. In the past, this would have taken 6 months.
HKS's ArchEngine lets you view 50 million textured polygons at 60fps. It is useful a $2 billion stadium being built in Texas right now, whose owner wanted to see the view from every seat. The drawback: the files are so huge that they are not given to clients; HKS makes a movie file -- as wel learn as we sit waiting for the stadium model to load in Unreal on a 28-pound laptop computer. "Live by technology, die by technology." We may have to use thumb puppets, he says, if it doesn't finish loading soon. Found the problem: the laptop was accidently running on its battery, meaning the CPU/GPU was in power-save mode, slowing it down greatly.
The other issue is licensing: as long as you don't give the environment to a client, there are no royalties or so. Large Revit models are a problem, and can take a half-week to clean up the model for use in Unreal. Because Unreal models are so huge (5x more than any other engine), the quality is not as good as as videos we saw earlier today.
Scott Ballis of Atomic 3D is going through all the steps -- and missteps -- involved in producing a rendered movie for promotional uses, a shopping mall in this case. Aerial shots are crucial for setting the location; you don't need helicopters ($12,000 to $15,000 for a couple of hours), but can get decent footage from Google Earth. See figure below.
In another for instance, using green screen to integrate live people into computer renderings. But live people can double the cost, like hair and makeup alone costing $7,000 for two days.
[Disclosure: RTC provided me with airfare, accomodation, ground transportation, and meals.]
DIGITAL JUICE
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