When to render

[glorybound]

Howdy-

I have a question.... do you have any rules of thumb for when you apply photo-real render techniques to your projects? Most of you get commissioned to do photo-real stuff, but at what point in the project are you seeing this happen? Is most of your work for sales and marketing? Our current workflow doesn't even take color into consideration until design and budget is completed. When is to early to go photo-real?

[Morne]

nevermind, was just rambling on and somehwere I forget the point I was trying to make

[thablanch]

I usually get photoreal when waiting on info.. So they give me stuff.. I build & texture.. and at one point there is some questions, so while waiting for the designers/architects, I spend that time making it photo-real.... So I do not know if it is too soon, I just deal with the time/requests I have.

[voltron7]

I usually get photoreal when waiting on info.. So they give me stuff.. I build & texture.. and at one point there is some questions, so while waiting for the designers/architects, I spend that time making it photo-real.... So I do not know if it is too soon, I just deal with the time/requests I have.

Pretty much same for me...

[Neilg]

Whenever it fits. We'll knock up a block model, send camera angles to a client then pick details we already know to detail and texture up.
Depends how the job goes though, i've had a job where the information was incredible (near overkill) and the client was going away for the first week so the entire thing was detailed up before the first camera was confirmed.

[Alan Iglesias]

Sure, my rule of thumb is to pretty much try to first define what my client means by the term "photo-real".

What I've found is that what most people want when they use that term is not so much a photograph-like image, that is, the type of image you get from using a camera, but what I would call "eye-real" which is the sense of what one sees when looking at a scene in real life. This means creating an image that may not be so much what a camera will produce, but trying to create a balanced image that is closer to what the eye sees in real time wothout producing something that looks unatural.

As the human eye and brain quickly change and compensate for drastic differnces in contrast of light and color, the sense is that everything is pretty much nicely exposed for a balanced image. So your CGI static image can be a balance that captures most important detail with perhaps non-camera style esposures, but still doesn't get to the point of looking visually unreal.

Just my .02$...

-Alan