Galvandale - Victory Missions Video

My first video clip for the second semester required me to create a visual 3d approach to the new additions to a church in Galvandale, Port Elizabeth. Under pressure to complete this massive task in a couple of weeks was no joke... The client had a date set... this deadline would eventually seem impossible to meet, 'but I re3fused to count my chickens until they hatched'.

My initial approach of 8 hours of modelling turned into nearly 30 hours...hence decreasing the amount rendering time on the already fragile time line. With many problems along the way, i would personally say that the biggest obstacle was the set of drawings. These drawings from plans to sections to elevations proved a constant inconsistency...none of the three matched. The design was never finished, leaving me with the daunting task of using my own discretion. The client insisted that the final product should be similar to that of the elevations - BUT - the actual floor plans were not symmetrical as laid out on the elevations sheet.

Never the less, i continued... and after a great deal of time, i was finally able to start rendering the final product *** this is where i got the fright of my life****

My proposal was to render the production in HD format... at this kind of resolution without textures, one would automatically expect higher rendering times, then i made the choice of final render.. BAM, the render times went through the roof!! it shot up to 4 days and counting...
With only 2 days to spare before deadline, i had to consult a couple of friends asking them if my use their pc's to render on...

A total count of 155 hours later and rendered over 4 high spec pc's...i nearly missed my deadline. With the final result looking good, i had to lose some of the features whereby the building was meant to phase in... floor, walls, seating and roof.

A great learning curb, but not one i would just take on any time soon....

Trial & Error

Working on two fly-by animations, one tends to learn a from past mistakes/errors, and in the long run your videos increase with depth and knowledge, as in the case with my second video (Urban living - parliament).

My personal approach starts off with modeling my entire scene in ''autocad'' followed by importing the dwg. file into ''MAx'' where I add the additional needed items such as vehicles, trees, furniture etc. Many of these libraries contain complex geometry, each with many of thousands of polygons with are simply to much information for CAD. If you have tried it in the past you will have noticed that the program either ''bombs out or it just corrupts the entire file...

Many of the blocks used in my works/scenes are extracted form the Archmodel series. If you are familiar with the Acrhmodel range, you will agree that even some of these blocks are so intensely detailed that your scene becomes extremely slow to navigate through... Don't fear, because i have found a new way of importing these blocks (trees especially).

By opening the block alone, you will be required to select the all polygons in the scene, followed by grouping it and finally by right clicking and selecting the 'make vray mesh' - this allows one to then save it to a location on your hdd and then lastly importing it as a vray proxy. Now you are able to have many if not hundreds of complex 'blocks' in your scene with out the scene becoming slow.

A definite must for vray users. I would recommend you view the following video on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDitd_iKbYQ

The linked video is a step by step tutorial showing you how to navigate through the process.