Film
Deadline Drama
I got an assignment to do an illustration (not the one above) for a financial magazine. The theme had to do with a drug company and its failed products. I built bottles with the names of the drugs on them and, flying pills in the air, had them falling down a set of stairs. The bottles were translucent, which was going to add to the rendering time of a final image. A few lights in the scene would also make things take longer. The illustration had to be 4″ x 5″ at 300 dpi, which was not very big by most standards, but I still figured I would give Alias Sketch software all the time it needed to finish the render. My magazine deadline was around 2 o’clock in the afternoon the next day. With everything ready to go, I hit the Render button at around 5:00 pm and went home to let it render all night.
In the morning I decided to go for a run and got to the studio at around noon. To my horror I saw that the render was only 49% done and realized I was in trouble. I would never make my deadline. Alias Sketch was what the world of 3D called Raytracing software. It was designed to make glass and metal look accurate, but it took a lot longer to render a scene. See the raytraced Spark plug below.
Tech Support to the Rescue
I had heard about a software program called Electric Image, which was a phong renderer (see above), not a ray tracer. It had a beautiful, lush look. Each rendering engine offers a different result, just as different films do/did. Electric Image had the reputation of being very, very fast. It was used to render the space scenes in the early Star Wars movies and I had just bought it. In fact, it was still in its box when I arrived at my studio the morning of my pill bottle disaster. How would I make this work?
I called Electric Image tech support and asked for their help. I had never used their software, so they guided me over the phone and told me how to export my Alias Sketch pill bottle models into their software. Then they explained how to add lights and move the camera position to capture the angle I wanted. When I hit the “Render” button my scene was done in 15 minutes. I made my deadline and from then on Electric Image became my primary renderer.
The Image Above: “Do Whatever You Want to Do.”
That is what the editors of a camera magazine told me when I asked if they wanted me to include any products in my cover illustration. Na. Nope. Nothing. Just do what you want. So I made my image. It was the one above, but it only had the wavy film and I submitted it.
“Hey, wait. Oh my gosh. You forgot all the other items.” The editors gushed.
“What other items? You told me to do whatever I wanted,” I said.
“Oh, no. We need Polaroid film, an Ektachrome film canister and an A-200 film canister also.”
“You’re kidding, right?”. I didn’t say that, but wanted to.
It took some time to build the models, but with Electric Image there was no overnight render. It took just a few minutes and the colors were gorgeous. They printed beautifully.
Spark Plug
Peter Neumann's Photography Blog 