Jonathan Goldstein, Lead Designer at StarLight Visual, started using SketchUp to develop his ideas a couple of years ago. k.
“My passion is to bend, meld and twist the idea of modern art, architecture, and visual media into forms that have not been seen on stage”
Using SketchUp and Shaderlight to develop their ideas is the first step for taking sketches and building something that would resemble a real life show.
“We typically start by adding in our venue, in most cases this is a sports arena, we then layout our staging and scenic and go from there. Our scale can range from a show to fit in a hockey floor arena layout to a festival ground so we are ALWAYS dealing with huge scaled items. The best approach for our first layer of designs is to begin with the chalk render, it gives us a generic feel to our model and allows us to keep the canvas a bit open ended creatively so it doesn’t lock our client into a specific outputted rendered image.”
Projects can be won or lost on the quality of images as Jonathan cannot always be in front of the client when they are viewing the design proposals. Images have to speak for themselves, too cartoonish or lacking in detail and the client can take this literally.
“In our latest project we had to simulate a theatrical sharks tooth scrim – a netting based fabric material that is weaved open to allow light to pass through. In the renders we created we were able to pull off the transparency in a way that felt realistic and we were able to really make the client understand the concept behind the visuals and lighting.”
A quick turnaround is vital and to improve productivity Jonathan and the team are using Shaderlight’s cloud rendering to produce complex renders and animations.
“Shaderlight is quick and works seamlessly with SketchUp. The integration and simple interface is very intuitive but the Cloud rendering is our most favourite new feature. Our workload sometimes meant that machines could be tied up for a whole day rendering. The ability to send jobs to the cloud have not only freed up our local machines but mean we can render more detailed visualisations that simply wow our clients.”
The images used in this case study are the actual renders created for the Alicia Keys performance at the 2012 MTV Video Music Awards. StarLight Visual Designed the Set and Lighting for the performance.
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