3DNY (formerly 3ds New York) is a monthly event bringing together students and professionals from across New York’s architectural, advertising, visual effects, interactive, gaming, and animation industries. The program began in June 2019 as a way for industry professionals to network and listen to presenters share their stories, experiences, challenges, and recent work. 3D enthusiasts have been gathering in Lucky Jack’s Bar on the second Wednesday of the month ever since (and, yes, drinks are available for purchase throughout the presentation).
In January, our own RadLab Director, Carlos Cristerna, was invited to share his most recent work. Since the launch of RadLab in 2018, Carlos has been working closely with companies like Epic Games, Nvidia, Chaos Group, Autodesk, Lenovo, and Vicon to test and develop new tools to substantially improve the process and workflow of Archviz solutions. He spent much of 2019 presenting his work at top industry events, including Autodesk University in Las Vegas, SOA ADX in Venice, and Siggraph in LA, to name a few. Now, he had the opportunity to share his insights with New York City’s 3D community.
Carlos kicked off the presentation with a brief introduction to RadLab’s origins, explaining how he identified the need to create an R&D department to explore new solutions that would benefit Neoscape’s clients, the company, and the industry in general. The rest of the presentation focused on his three most recent projects – all of which are considered game-changers for the future of Architectural Visualization.
Unreal Engine
He began with his experience working alongside Epic Games Unreal Engine developers and the introduction of new Real-Time Raytrace solutions, thanks to the new Nvidia RTX graphic cards. A highlight of the night was his demonstration of how the technology can create a 4-minute architectural/artistic film in real-time (that’s right, forget about those render times, soon they will be a thing of the past)
Project Lavina
Following his Unreal Engine demonstration, he shared a preview of what Chaos Group is developing, a 100% Real-time Raytracing engine, so far known as Project Lavina. Though it’s still in the initial phases of the development (not in Beta yet), Carlos has been working closely with the developers, testing the engine and providing feedback to improve it. We were given a sneak peek of how it works, seeing how easily it could translate a VRay scene into a Raytraced environment. From here, we could tweak materials, lighting, cameras in Real-Time, and generate high-quality renderings and animations in a matter of seconds.
Motion Capture Technology
Last, but certainly not least, he briefly presented the motion capture technology Neoscape has been using for a couple of years now to enhance storytelling through CG animated characters. The technology takes a tool more commonly used in expensive Hollywood productions and applies it to ArchViz, creating solutions that otherwise would be difficult to achieve. While there are still plenty of improvements to be made in this field, the R&D time invested by the RadLab and Neoscape team continues to bring about better results.
We could easily have stayed at Lucky Jack’s for hours, watching additional demonstrations and bombarding Carlos with questions. Alas, the one and only James Falconer, event co-host, eventually brought the presentation to a close. The event was definitely time well spent and a great way to kick off 2020.
A big thanks to all the 3DNY hosts – Mengyi Fan, James Falconer, and Kim Lee – presenters, sponsors, audience, and Lucky Jack’s crew!!
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