Blurring the boundary

by Halli Bjornsson AA Dipl. MD of Cadai Ltd, www.cadai.com

In this article I´m exploring how CG professionals define themselves and how they see their roles evolving in the future. My main interest was from understanding where they would see their work and role from a general perspective where the companies and individuals of today will be operating in the future. If there’s anything we can take for granted then it’s that things change and do so rather rapidly when it comes to CG. The increasing technological awareness of those involved in any way with building things, the web, hardware advances and the maturing of the CG professions all bring us to an interesting cocktail of potential changes.

I had an excellent visit to Smoothe Ltd, in the Uk. They’re doing some great stuff and are needless to say very respected in the CG community.

Let’s start off with my interview with Jon Hey at Smoothe in the UK.

I asked him straight about how Smoothe defines itself:
“ Smoothe is essentially a design communication company with studios in London, Manchester and Calgary. We utilise new technology to create film, images, animation, music, events and exhibitions that communicate and promote ideas.”

When did you start out?
“ Smoothe started about 4 years ago creating digital imagery for the architectural industry, which has always been the core focus of our work. The balance of this work is split fairly evenly between the production of photo-realistic images in support of planning applications, and those for marketing purposes.”

What sort of projects are you currently working on?
“We’ve just completed about 30 minutes of interior and exterior animation and 30 still images for the promotion of a large residential development of 40 towers in Dubai. We were competing against several companies worldwide and won the commission based not only on our portfolio of work but also our capacity and confidence to handle that scale of project to the quality and timescales demanded, an important factor and one which rules out many talented but smaller studios.”

You’ve mentioned that a large part of your work involves developers rather than architects, how do you see that extending?
“ Typically images, a website and perhaps an animation form the basis of digital marketing material for any new development but I think there’s room to extend that to a greater range of media products. Our aim is to find the best delivery method or methods for each project for maximum impact and exposure.”

I can see that you undertake R&D and you’re currently venturing into realtime interactive content.
“ One product we are keenest to develop is the real-time virtual environment. We’ve already produced a game style representation of a large housing scheme. The game challenges the player to find their way around the development, familiarising themselves with the layout and from a realistic human point of view. Although designed with a ‘Super Mario’ flavour the game also seeks to demonstrate some serious aspects of the design. In particular a lot of effort has gone into the design of the spaces between the buildings, in addition to the buildings themselves. However the ‘go anywhere’ game style does mean every angle of the environment has to be considered where an animated sequence may tactfully hide those areas not fully resolved.

The use of virtual environments may equally be applicable to planning as it is to marketing. In fact planning authorities may eventually insist on real-time virtual representations of submitted schemes so they can view them dynamically and from any realistic viewpoint. An accurate ‘virtual city’ model into which any proposed schemes could be inserted would be a useful evaluation tool, again not only for the buildings themselves but for those spaces that lock them together.
We’re pushing hard to towards providing a more complete digital suite of products for future projects.

We’re pushing hard to towards providing a more complete digital suite of products for future projects.
With careful planning a package of various promotional media tools, e.g. interactive DVD’s, images, animation and real-time virtual environments etc can be assembled to target the widest possible audience and because the majority of the work involved is in the creation of the 3d model (from which much of the overall content is generated) for most projects, repackaging it for different media although equally skilled is less time consuming, resulting in a significant cost savings compared to those if commissioned separately.”

Food for thought

Jon touched on quite a few things, which I found very interesting with regards to how the profession is changing. This effects both the business environment professionals in this area exist in as well as the tasks they undertake and their roles. They are intertwined and complex to say the least but I’ll make a brave effort to come to some sort of conclusion. You’re no doubt going to find some of the things I say obvious but bear with me.

As I’ve mentioned before then we’ve got a cocktail of influences. They are mostly as I can see it:

• Processing power
• Software development
• Different outlets for CG
     o Web
     o TV
     o Films
     o Games/realtime
     o Construction industry
• Project sizes
• Transfer of skillbase
     o From external services to internal within companies and vice versa.
     o Between different disciplines
• Maturing project managament

Processing power
What does that actually mean for people? Firstly it’s allowed individuals to create material previously only achievable by companies with big bucks, when it comes to rendering power. The result is a flood of superb material onto the web galleries and little distinction in visual quality between the big company and the individual, at least not due to rendering power. Distributed processing across the web further accentuates this.

Software development
High end software is getting cheaper by the day and more accessible. It’s also getting easier to use and therefore reducing the cost/specialism threshold. You can also do more things and offer more varied services which leads to more specialism. It also means there is a bigger potential market for CG architecture. These new markets, one of which is realtime which a part of is what I regard as consumable architecture is converging in formats. This means that CG material will be less and less about creating the basic geometry and more about composition and post production of 3D content. Object libraries and automated creation processes through software will further increase this movement.

Different outlets for CG
I’ve listed already what some of those outlets are. In essence then CG will be used to represent just about anything in any electronic media and architecture or the built environment is thankfully a backdrop to most things. If CG architects position themselves correctly then they should rightfully be the subject matter experts there which would provide them with endless amounts of work in a great variety of formats.

Project sizes
CG is the best thing to keep track of, develop and represent in any way complex development projects. Processing power and software development are obvious catalysts to this and vice versa. As we can see from Jon’s comments then the big studio has an obvious advantage there but one can envisage through the use of the web an environment where a more film based project structure is used which ultimately gives more flexibility and more scope for specialism.

Transfer of skillbase
I’ve always found it interesting how knowledge flows through the industry. It doesn’t seem long since a render was an expensive, exotic thing, which the architect’s client didn’t want to pay for. If I’m correct then most research is still done by individuals who push the boundary in their own time out of sheer curiosity or desire to achieve something special. The most interesting research that I tend to see is usually nothing to do with a financial gain and more to do with a near manic obsession on a CG artist’s behalf.
Looking at what individuals within architectural CG are capable of and are working on then it’s easy to see how the boundaries become un-clear. It also facilitates a certain migration of skills and work between different medium outlets. It’s also easy to see how after a while the CG-shop will start developing architecture for TV and games etc and companies within those areas doing the same for architecture. These things are already happening as I’ve seen.

Maturing project management
Not the most exciting subject but it’s probably going to be the most influential part of how the CGA market will develop in the coming years. Most of the Cad application companies are looking at being able to hook work up more efficiently, using the web etc. This makes it easier for people to work off-site and makes it easier for those managing projects to keep track of what’s going on. There’s quite a long way to go but it’s going in the right direction.
This is the key precursor to the potentially most exciting thing about how things will develop in terms of how the industry is structured which is the advent of temporary remote teams. It’s not a new idea by any means but it’s just about becoming possible with the arrival of cheap broadband, and online CG markets for labour. It doesn’t replace the studio by any means but allows for a more flexible setup with lower overheads. It means also that a smaller studio doesn’t necessarily have to be punished for not being able to do extensive research in new areas all the time. When they have to, they can hire someone to come in, much the same as the architects have been hiring CG specialists to come in. Being able to do it over the web means you can get more competition for the work and lower rates which is particularly useful on larger projects but you can also then potentially get the best person in that area of expertise to work with you on the project even though they’re not in your neighbourhood.

Summary
My brief investigation gives me the impression that there are no rules as to what CG pros will and won’t do in terms of techniques as long as they’re communicating something about the built environment with a computer.
The increased variety of techniques leads to potentially bigger teams (and more specialism), which are either studio-bound, and or a collection of people that get together for a particular project in one place or remotely. The super CG architect of the future is therefore someone who lives at home with his parents, computer and broadband connection. The super CG-architecture studio is then most likely a smallish office with some managers, good sales room and a big database of the aforementioned which they farm work out to when it arrives. This is obviously slightly tongue–in-cheek but with some element of truth attached I feel. Small is beautiful in the long run because it’s more flexible and has fewer overheads, which in turns allows for more specialism on select few projects etc.

The images in the article are provided by Smoothe Ltd and are from the realtime “Super Mario”-project. Special thanks go to Jon Hey, Kevin Coffey and Mark Cleghorn at Smoothe Ltd.