lasse1309

for years we are offering free cut-outs on our xoio-air site. it is our staff shot by ourselves. very diverse: 50-50 male/female, 8-9 different nationalities. maybe more. all kinds of orientation. do you "see" it in an image? no. the french guy looks like the germans and you can't distinguish the "gay" from the "straight". equipping the one with a baguette and a mustache and the other one with a panzerfaust would not do the job and might be quite disappropriate in all possible use cases i could think of. (and would be "stereotyping", huh?) well, they are all "white" but sorry: not once a "black" person applied for working here. not once. and maybe it could have to do with our local demographics. sorry for providing free content.

What Juraj says is both most valuable advices. One can stick to them and life will be good! Find what you like the most in this job and what you want to be - be it the technically obsessed geek-pioneer, the skilled artist or the nice dude people like to work with. everything is valuable, it is just up to you how you like and how you function best (also emotionally) But making mistakes is part of your own evolution, experience and pain is a better teacher than hear-say Just don't let the hindsight-failures let depress you - buckle up and try again!

the three world modell is outdated anyway; it stems from the time the world was devided in three blocs which was first world associated with NATO/USA/"the west", second world associated to USSR and third associated to neither of them; had not really anything to do with wealth in the first place - of course the societies in the countries in the "worlds" share certain things among each others.. so if you would stay in the three world modell, then a large number of "Eastern Euro" countries would be first world anyway because of being Member/associated with the EU - and the USA (and even the NATO). Ico's point is very fair and correct at a bottom line: Find your niche and grow it from there. The business is always a "who you know thing", best contacts and jobs come from referrals - the internet is a good place to generate awareness and find some initial good contacts (among all the cheapos that ask for 300€ pay for whole project) - the growth and developing happens in the "real" world - whatever first, second, third, fourth, new, old...

i feel your pain, but: In EVERY industry prices drop when the pioneers are caught up by the crowd. the task then: pioneer on or die. This is what drives innovation and is the core of our system. so stop complaining and hit the render button either faster or better. jokes aside: as Scott says correctly quality of output is only one thing - and has not much to do with quality of process, taste etc. But in the end it boils down to the thing that if you can't sell your product you would have to change it. all the best Lasse

actually corona is very realistic - it is actually really hard to make it act "not-real" due to the easy setup. you simply control the brightness via the color-mapping, there is a great video on youtube explaining the fast setup and how to use sun&sky system, really worth a watch. honestly I cannot see Juraj being a bully at all - not even in the reply he gave to your statement. he knows what he is talking about and has a strong opinion based on ratio, I can assure you. Myself using a handful of engines in daily production can just say each has its strengths. Corona's in my eyes for sure lies in the photorealism possible in a very quick and uncomplicated manner. in general i can say i hate all of them engines, but differently cheers L

there will always be painting, drawing, photography and visualization. the only thing which might happen many years down the road is there won't be a distinction between "real-time" and "off-line". both are heading into directions that one day they will meet and merge! still there has to be a human that rides the machine and gets the aesthetics out of it. btw: merry christmas, everyone

these are a great read! honestly, i dont think the "real-time thingy" will replace our regular work in near future or will ever at all. Of course off-line rendering will become faster and possible quality of real-time engines will decrease - but i see it more as an add-on. actually it's a different product for different purposes. animations for arch/real-estate is only for prestigious projects that want to "show" something or justify a luxurious price as well today. expensive things are hard to sell and every "gimmick" wellcome to set you apart from the competitor. the regular set for the regular-joe-developement will stay and I don't expect this being replaced by "real-time", at least not in the way we think of it today. you are right in everything! this has to be tried out - and of course that requires a lot of work. it is not done within no time - but that also is not the case doing it the "traditional" way. all I can say is, the UE offers a lot of possibilities for optimizing things. honestly, what i myself really liked about the unreal engine is the possibility to get rid of the AOish look you always get in other real-time engines and the really high quality of GI! and thats also the reason why i took this very white scene. in darker environments it is always fairly easy to hide the faults best

oh, yeah that's definetely a big scene but well - maybe one would spilt the building up into different parts you can basically instance.. and when getting closer you would change the sun become dynamic. the lightmass then would only do the "GI" and there you would not se broken shadows. of course it's a bit labourious, but i know it's possible :') but you are right: the time saved in "production" in terms of rendertimes will be consumed at a different point in the process, for sure! cheers

try it

we're on it of course you would have to build a lot more for a scene where you can actually move freely: but there's again the question whether you want that or not. the "zen garden" demo by epic shows in a very nice way how you could navigate through such scene. fromm discussion with clients i know for exampe the ego-shooter style walk through is nothing you want to sell an expensive apartment with. this has to be done different - how is still to be elaborated I actually cannot see why you should hate it. It can be very laborious, of course - hehe, maybe i sound a bit too positivistic in the text but tbh, i am very excited. i made my bad experiences with different other real time engines. cryengine may have a better dynamic lighting, but the whole shading and import thing is hell on earth! honestly, i prefer baking and unwrapping a bit to not get it done at all

hey, well, honestly - it is very fast, you basically only have to seperate your modelling from the app.. even the unwrapping thing has become easier a lot. it generates automatically on import, and in most cases that is good enough! cheers Lasse

hey everyone! we are releasing a new free set of cutout-people we produced last summer with our extra purchased green screen-wall this time the set is filled up with semi-professional modells (it is infact the xoio-staff ) so we had better control of the poses and so on. the first package contains a set of 65 mased-out people for the use in arch-viz images. we are deploying them on our freshly set-up freebie site xoio-air.de Actually we also always wanted to test our luck with greenscreen. We bought that cheap greenscreen wall and moved out last summer to take tons of images. We keyed the first set of cutoutpeople and we are happy to share them. have fun and peace Lasse

juraj, i really like your style! your portfolio looks great as well - very talented, indeed best regards from berlin

Dear Jeff, dear Forum! I am glad to see the awards will go on and i am VERY eager to see what nature the entries will be this year. The winning entries have been very influential on the following years each time so - we will see I think your idea to split the awards off into different catergories are fine - and i can see the point in dividing it into commercial and non-commercial. (Even though the framework of client driven work differs a lot from time to time, no? there are long-term projects, short-term, friendly clients, annoying clients, overcritical clients, clients that see you as an artist with a professional knowledge, clients that see you as the guy who hits F10, clients from heaven, clients from hell... To be honest: working on personal projects with yourself as a client is hard as well: overcritial, working only late hours and on weekends, zero payment... ) But i have some problems with dividing that again into "real" and "conceptual". I don't think these should be criteria in arch-viz. our job is to communicate architecture and that is what an arch-viz award should honour - it should not become a render vs. painting thing. But i can see the difficulties. as a judge last year i found it very hard to compare stunning hyper-realistic renders with imagery that has obviously been created within a short time-frame but was highly emotive and of high quality as well. But this is something someone does see in the judging process. there is no photoreal and personal = good vs. conceptual and client-work = bad. each piece stands for itself and will be judged like that in such a contestual-process. the point is this: jeff, do whatever you like - a few categories are fine and i am looking forward to the awards. best regards Lasse Rode xoio

four more: