Ritz Carlton Sunny Isles

[Neilg]

Large residential beach front luxury tower, you all know the drill. Any questions i'll be happy to answer.
Great client, was a fun run of images to work on.

https://www.facebook.com/dboxcreative

We have 2 animations of the north & south units in progress too, they'll be finished in 4 - 6 weeks.

[iancamarillo]

Beautiful. Do you use BF for both ext/int? What is your final resolutions? How many machines participate on each image and how long does it take? Thanks!!!!

[Neilg]

Thank you!
All of these were using IR / LC. final resolution of most was 6k across, but the first hero image up there was delivered at 14k across. 2 images shot from a heli using a 5ds and stitched to make the backplate.

we rendered these using DR and render time was anywhere from 2 to 4 hours. probably 8-16 hours if we were using a single machine for each image.

[Pixelcon]

Hey Neil,

Wonderful work as per usual. I thought I'd ask you as I reckon you'd be the best to ask seeing as you guys do a lot of images with a lot of glass: What is your approach to rendering "user-friendly". Do you render as a separate pass? If so, do you render the glass as a mirror and control the contribution via simple opacity in post? How do tackle the issue of glass in front of glass like in images 5 and 8? Each time I try a different approach, I come up against so many pro's and con's for each...

Cheers,
James

[Neilg]

For this we rendered it all as separate passes as a mirror - and in cases of glass in front of glass we broke it up to render each layer separately.
There are massive pro's and cons for all methods, but in the last 5% of the work we're doing before delivery our client comments almost always include ones like 'push this layer of glass back, bring up the background reflection in this one' and the control always pays off.

[pixelplume]

great work!

[Nicinus]

Oh my. These are stunning, incredible really. I would love to see a wireframe and a raw render of the first and fourth images. I'm just really curious how much of a picture like this is done in post.

[Pixelcon]

For this we rendered it all as separate passes as a mirror - and in cases of glass in front of glass we broke it up to render each layer separately.
There are massive pro's and cons for all methods, but in the last 5% of the work we're doing before delivery our client comments almost always include ones like 'push this layer of glass back, bring up the background reflection in this one' and the control always pays off.

Ok great Thanks for the info, Neil!

[Macker]

Fantastic. How much is CGI/How much is post? Would be really great to see some raw renders/wires.

[AJ Jefferies]

Absolutely fantastic work.

Maintaining that lawn around those stones is going to be a biiiiiitch

[Neilg]

raw renders and wires all in one!
Penthouse didnt change a great deal - the beach walk one we would have normally re-lit after doing the draft and seeing how much the light got boosted but it was pretty much noise free so we rolled with it.

[Macker]

Great stuff! Boosting the lighting/shadow passes on that outdoor one really makes a huge difference.

[Nicinus]

Thanks for the gifs, truly wonderful work.

Amazing how much that last step does. As far as I tell can by looking at these until my head spins everything up until that last moment is tweaking of passes? Did you use Vray for bloom and glare?

[AlexP]

Really nice
Interested to know - how long the project has run from start to this point? and how many people working on it?

[Neilg]

Did you use Vray for bloom and glare?

No, they're all hand placed lens flares. a few hundred per image probably.

We've been working on the project since early December, there's been a lot of design development & work on the animation storyboard & scenes has been on going. The animation is essentially finished now - just scene management, minor tweaks, rendering & post work to go.
There's been like 2 people full time, 2 more part time jumping in as needed juggling some smaller things. Probably averages out to a solid 3 people.

Full time work on the full run of 10 stills probably comes out to around 4 weeks for the averaged out full time of 3 people. Lots of pauses & other bits though.