It’s not so much that spring has arrived as it is the realization that winter sort of phoned it in this year. Whatever the case, flowers here in Toronto were so early that we seem to have blown through daffodil and tulip time and are on schedule for roses to bloom before the May 24 long weekend.

A couple months ago we wrote in this very space that there’s a lot to be said for the beauty of winter-themed architectural visualisations. And while we stand by that statement, we have just as much fun with greening your projects with all manner of flowers, shrubbery, cacti, trees and grasses of all sorts.

Indeed, we have a green-thumbed modeller here by the name of Kasia, who, when not tending to her piece of the Leslie Spit community garden, spends her time obsessing over plants of the digital ilk. And though they don’t require watering, a lot of love goes into selecting virtual vegetation so that it conforms as closely as possible with the landscape requirements of a given project, be it set in a tropical, temperate or desert location: some projects require a “natural” look while others call for a more manicured approach. If you’ve ever witnessed the glazed over expression of somebody addicted to FarmVille, you’ll understand how zenned out computer gardening of this sort can be.

Anyway. Besides making the analytic part of your brain shut down, spring has a way of making one revel in all things that grow. Watching sprouts germinate is exciting in a sort of slow-mo way that only those of us who have planted tomato seeds in April really understand; but when you see it in fast-forward virtual time it’s totally hypnotic.

To prove my point I dare you to view this video and then try and concentrate on any work that takes even a thimbleful of brainpower. After a long season of “blah,” flowers make you want to run outside and frolic in the park, throwing your hands up while skipping around in wild abandon like a kid, by which, of course, I mean a baby goat rather than human offspring.

On second thought, if you have spring productivity issues like I do, it might be better not to click that link. We can’t have all of Canada cavorting outside when there’s work to be done.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This popped up on BuzzBuzz homes the other day.

Remember NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter? Well, after successfully traversing the 669 million kilometers of space between Earth and our red neighbour, it passed at too low an altitude upon arriving and disintegrated in the atmosphere. It turns out that the people in charge of calculating the probe’s trajectory forgot to convert imperial units into the standard metric ones.  That was an important detail.

We pay closer attention to details than that NASA trajectory team because we know they bring believability to the rendering; that is, we know that the impression the overall rendering has on the viewer is to a great extent a function of the details, though that’s not immediately apparent even to the trained eye.

That’s why we spend extra time on things such as reveals—the junction between two materials or geometric objects.  Something as simple as the point where the wall meets the floor, if done improperly, calls attention to itself in a way that says “there’s something not quite right here.”  Or take fabrics.  Getting the right colour or pattern is one thing, but matching the texture so things that are supposed to be fuzzy actually look fuzzy is another.  The “noise” of any given texture map (the imagery that is overlaid on top of a geometric shape) may need to be tweaked in Photoshop to make sure that the Jensen armchair from Minotti has that sexy velvet sheen it’s supposed to have.

We’ve gone so far as to custom-model each and every individual brick in a building if we don’t think that the masonry image applied to that wall is cutting it.  Okay, some people might call that a bit obsessive, though I bet the NASA team wishes it had been accused of that when word of the “metric mixup” was leaked.

It’s not rocket science: details add up. And while you might not be working with the same sort of budgets that are involved in space-flight missions, it’s important that the marketing material for your project hits the mark…or at the very least doesn’t crash land.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, research has shown that where virtual people are concerned, as we traverse the spectrum from cartoon-like toward realism, our response moves from delight to revulsion, and back to delight as we behold real people.  In other words, we have an inbuilt, negative emotional reaction to depictions of humans that look almost, but not quite, human.

Obviously, this is important where populating your rendering is concerned. The last thing you want is for people to be repelled by your condo-citizens.  It’s bad for sales.  So it goes without saying that we put a lot of thought into when we use 2D photos of real people and when we insert 3D, mathematically generated model-people.

The former of these are just as they sound: they’re regular photographs of living, breathing people that we insert in the last stages of the rendering.  That is, they’re placed using Photoshop after the scene has been rendered.  They look photorealistic, because, well, they’re photographs.

Three-dimensional people, meanwhile, use geometry and texture maps just like the buildings in the rendering around them (click here to see their component parts).  If we rendered the same scene from a different angle we could show their backside—without making any additional adjustments! In short, they live in the scene with the buildings as opposed to be being placed as an additional layer in the finished image.

That last part sounds like a huge advantage, right? You might ask why bother painstakingly placing 2D photographs of people in the finished image when we’d have to do it all over again if we decide to re-render the scene at a different viewing angle? Not to mention the fact that matching the lighting conditions under which your 2D person was photographed to the finished scene can be tedious and difficult. Three-dimensional people are lit mathematically like the buildings around them and require no additional tweaking in this respect. They will automatically be lit the same and cast the same shadows as all other objects in the shared environment.

The problem is that 3D people take a really, really, really long time to model convincingly enough so that they get to the point where we don’t get “weirded out” by them.  Long enough that, practically speaking, there’s no budget large enough to achieve populating your rendering with completely photo-realistic 3D people.  Hair, for example, takes an astonishing amount of work to convince even the least observant among us that the person they’re looking at isn’t “fake”: rendering each individual strand takes crazy amounts of CPU power and time. So, if you’re ever managing a project with no deadline and no budget, this could be the way to go.

Mostly, we use 3D people in animations, since it would be close to impossible to do a fly through with moving 2D images: you would need a different photograph of every person in the scene for every frame!  When we do use 3D citizens in these cases, though, we usually “ghost” them so that all the viewer sees are moving silhouettes. This gives us the ability to populate your animation while avoiding problems associated with showcasing humans that people could spot as fakes and have that almost subconscious negative reaction to we talked about above.

So there you have it. Unless you’re looking for an interesting Valentine’s date, being 3-dimensional isn’t always a plus.

It’s best to think of a digital image’s resolution as “resolution at a certain size.” This makes it much easier to relate to elements involved in defining an image’s properties.

Consider a stamp-sized image (see above), the dimensions of which are 1 inch by 1 inch.  If this image is at 300 DPI (dots per inch)* it means that it will be 300 pixels wide and 300 pixels high.  This will give us a total pixel count of 90,000 pixels (300 x 300). A megapixel is 1,000,000 pixels, so this 300 DPI image, as “high-resolution” as it is, has a fraction of the pixels that even the cheapest digital camera captures with each embarrassing picture it snaps at your office party.

Similarly, an 8 by 10 inch picture at 300 PPI will be 3000 pixels wide and 2400 pixels high; this will give us a total pixel count of 7.2 million pixels (7.2 megapixels).

What Resolution Do you Need for your Project?
When printing to paper, we should be asking ourselves how many total pixels we’ll need in order to fill a given physical paper size. Let’s see what this means given that our standard high-resolution file is 5000 pixels in the widest dimension.

In the magazine world, for instance, the standard resolution is 300 DPI.  Well, if your file is 5000 pixels by 5000 pixels (25 megapixels), at 300 DPI (meaning it takes 300 pixels to print an inch of the image) the maximum print out size will have physical dimensions of 16.67 by 16.67 inches (5000/300=16.67).

Meanwhile, a standard resolution for posters is 150 DPI, and at that resolution the same digital file can print a poster at 33.3 x 33.3 inches (5000/150=33.3). Moving on, you could print out a billboard ad just over 9¼ by 9¼ feet at 45 DPI, a perfectly acceptable resolution for this application.

Resizing
There are a couple ways to increase the size of an image (by which we mean increase the total number of pixels) so it will print to a larger area than the maximum defined above.

One is to increase  it through a “resampling” procedure in Photoshop.  This method uses various algorithms to best create new neighbouring pixels. We increase the size in 10% increments so as to minimize the amount of new information generated in each step, thereby resulting in less pixelation (a term denoting the point where individual pixels become visible) and a higher quality print. This method has proven to be just as effective as using custom resizing software.

The second is to produce a high quality print with continuous tone colour similar to photos developed on traditional photo paper. This print is in turn scanned at the desired final output resolution (ie. 12 feet wide at 45 DPI). The inks in the printing process blend together a bit at their edges, effectively creating new neighbouring pixels (as above) in a manner that also reduces pixelation.

The first resizing method is free, but, depending on how big your large-format target medium is, it can, in some instances, result in some pixelation. For billboards this isn’t an issue because the viewer isn’t standing close to the image; that is, when you’re 10 meters away from an image you simply won’t see a difference. On larger posters this is also more than adequate.

The latter procedure costs money, but might be the better choice for certain applications such as very large interior murals, since in such cases the viewer can be right next to the image.

Why 5000 pixels?
You might wonder why we chose 5000 pixels as our maximum dimension. There’s no single answer to this question, there being many factors at play.

For one, notice that doubling the height and width of an image results in a file with quadruple the amount of information; the image of the stamp above, if doubled to 600 pixels across, would contain four times as much information (360,000 pixels vs 90,000 pixels). A 25 megapixel image becomes a 100 megapixel image! Not only would this dramatically increase rendering times, but working with files of this size would tax even the most powerful workstations—and we’re already running computers with 16 processing cores!

Larger files means slower everything, including opening files, lighting, populating, and doing those final subtle tweaks that turn a good rendering into something stunning.  5000 pixels is a size that balances the needs of the majority of our clients with what can realistically be accomplished in the time frames of the average project.

What Does all this Mean?
For the vast majority of projects 5000 pixels should be more than enough to get you a crisp image sharp enough for just about every application. If you’ve got something else in mind let us know: we’ll be happy to help figure out the best way to get that rendering on the side of an airplane!

*For our purposes we will equate DPI to PPI (pixels per inch) in order to simplify the relationship between pixels and print as far as the concept of resolution is concerned.

It’s always interesting to see how defined narratives emerge from seemingly random footage.  What story did Kristine uncover? In the eternal dispute that is Tim Horton’s vs. Starbucks there is only one objective certainty that stands alone, above the petty, partisan bickering: raisin tea biscuits are delicious.

Click here to view the embedded video.