Here’s a post about a big room with nothing in it - I’ve been working with the incredibly talented @AlanMattano the past few months, assembling an entire collection of assets for rendering. What started as “hey, can you make a realistic PBR Chimera for me, one that actually is a useful studio rendering asset, like this one?”
Well, somehow, that morphed into a much much bigger project. The goal is to create an entirely physically based (non HDRI) automotive photography studio - one that works for all the standard up close shots, but also when you pull back from the vehicle, you get a wonderful world of context clues that tell a complete story. We eventually decided that we would create a warehouse that would house all the studio assets. I’ve been a big fan of the Liminal Spaces movement, and at some point we just started referring to this thing as the Liminal Warehouse. For those not familiar - a very worthy watch:
We started with a Turbosquid model that had some of the right feel and geometry, and then got to work modifying it to what it is now. Learned tons along the way. Like how Rhino Blocks can drive one half mad. But they’re also insanely useful for renderings. That you should never assume that Turbosquid geometry, event he most basic of stuff, is symmetrical. Because when you start arraying and mirroring, you find all the mistakes and nothing lines up. Also got an appreciation for working with basic mesh objects, even just inside Rhino. I’ll be doing more of that! And also - given enough time, @AlanMattano will find allllllll the bugs. Seriously, this would not have come out anywhere nearly as well without Alan. This is really Alan’s baby more than mine. A huge amount of effort went into optimizing the startup time - that is the time it takes from switching into Raytraced mode, till it actually starts rendering. Happy to report that’s down to about 3-4 seconds. On a 4090 it’ll crank out about 100 frames per minute at 4k, depending on if the sun is on or not. Over the coming weeks we’ll be populating it with our proper photo studio assets - which again went hilariously far beyond “hey let’s make a Chimera light bank” - but I really like how our Liminal Warehouse came out, so I figured I’d make a little post on it.
-Sky