The world of CG never stands still and neither do we. We are always on the look out for new technology that can help our clients bring their new designs to life.
We are currently testing a wide range of software, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. But it can be hard for these new technologies in their infancy to fit into our industrial strength process and provide a commercially viable imaging service.
For example, some of the latest most realistic renderers available are based on the real physics of light and provide images that are difficult to tell from a photograph, they are superb. This is just what we want!!! However, to get CAD data into these packages means we need to turn files into polygons (lots of triangles representing the surfaces). Easy for a small handheld product, but too time consuming for whole train interior. There's the snag. Another snag, render times can be huge. A hi-res render could take a couple of days on a really fast machine for a clean image.
Or how about a real-time render solutions lit only by a HDR image. A wonderfully interactive way of composing your shot. Well it looks very promising, but unless you have the right HDR image for the job (well we do have our own camera now!) then you can't get the right look. But you can't make a new HDR for every job. Sometimes traditional CGI lighting techniques allow you to create a very specific look that you need faster and with better results.
All these technologies are exciting and we are loving playing with them - but our choice of rendering solution for our day to day business needs to be industrial strength and fast, so we are sticking to our renderdrives for the time being.
