BlueLime Studio Blog

I’ll Gladly Trade My Kingdom For a Hamburger;

Said the King who wished everything he touched turned to gold. I guess in his greed, he failed to realize that even food and the finest pilsner would as well.

Recently we entered a competition by the name of the Aurora Awards. We submitted a couple of our finest pieces in hopes of recognition for our hard work, attention to detail, and diverse skill. Although we could only wish that they both came back gold; we’re happy with what happened.

Hellooooo Nurse!

For this project Core Communities came to us needing an Architectural Animation created showing off a neighborhood in their community that is currently under construction in South Carolina. You can check out the finished animation here!

Open house time (finally)!

We’ve been in our newly renovated/expanded space for just over a year now, and we’ve been so busy that we never had time to throw a grand opening party—until now that is.

At the prodding of (and in conjunction with) our good friends at The Creative Coast Alliance, we finally threw an open house/grand opening party. We had several of our clients show up to check out the new space, and met some new people that TCCa invited as part of the open house aspect of the party.

Thanks again to everyone involved, and also to everyone who attended! We might just have to make a yearly thing of it now. 

You can check out some of the pics from the party below….

Out With the Old, In With the BLU

I can’t explain with just words how awesome Blu-Ray is; but I’ll give it a shot! We have just completed a very large project that was output to Blu-Ray and it looks phenomenal! DVD’s have finally been laid to rest (in my humble opinion). Now all we need is for technology to become cheaper and more readily available so everyone can enjoy this leap forward in video entertainment.

I’ve always been into the DVD spec. Back in my college days I was always trying to push the envelope with the limitations that DVD spec 1.0 had. After experiencing those limitations and downfalls I had an idea of what I wanted DVD spec 2.0 to consist of. I was severely disappointed when all they added was online content and didn’t even touch the video stream rates, audio capabilities, or looping functions of the menu systems. Although my sound professor and I did end up with a 6 channel, uncompressed audio disc after doing a lot of tricking with the software. The DVD players decoder unfortunately couldn’t keep up with the mass amounts of data and played the audio on all 6 channels, but played it slowed down. Blu-Ray has since been able to achieve that with the introduction of the HDMI connection and multi-S/PDIF connections on audio receivers.

The future is very bright (and higher res!) with Blu-Ray being here. The experience people can now have when buying a movie is so much greater (especially from a developers standpoint). More screen space, better menu animation/looping functionality, serious online content which can be downloaded and played interactively with the disc. Maybe now people will actually watch the extra features.

BlueLime Studio at the AIA National Convention

So we exhibited at the American Institute of Architects (AIA) national convention in Boston this year, and while we won’t know yet if it was a roaring success, we definitely had a good turnout. We made quite a few contacts, gave out ALL of our squeeze limes, and met up with some old friends and clients.

Nacho Ordinary Technology!

In this day and age, technology is advancing faster than ever. With the introduction of devices such as Apple’s iPhone and Sony’s PSP (Play Station Portable) keeping connected and able to interact on a worth-while level has never been easier than now. We deal with a lot of video here at BlueLime Studio and we’re not always at our desks to have a look at things. Whether we’re at a convention in another state, at a clients office across town, or laying on the beach in another country we all know that work has a way of finding us.

We don’t let such scenarios halt productivity (except maybe the beach one). The video codec H.264 allows full motion video/audio to be played on our favorite hand held devices and look great! I’ll skip the very technical mumbo jumbo but it was created to allow for better video with a smaller file size (smaller and better quality than previous mpeg based formats). So instead of saying “WE NEED THIS REVIEWED INTERNALLY AND TO THE CLIENT LIKE YESTERDAY!” followed by “WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY CANT GET TO A COMPUTER?!” Now you can format video for these awesome platforms and keep the well oiled machine running.

Gone are the days where you have to be anchored to a computer with an internet connection. The iPhone supports wireless internet via EDGE, and the PSP can jump on any wifi signal in the area.

Give me options!

Every client we work with uses our images in a different work flow.  Some have a final design and solid set of construction drawings, so they only need the visual images to complete their projects.  On the far end of the spectrum are the clients who have no idea what the final design will look like, but have some thoughts on what may be possible, and need someone to take their ideas and give them form.  The range that falls in between are generally designers who know what they are targeting, but find our service to be an additional design element available to them.  This can be anything from material changes to design alterations.

In this first set of architectural renderings you can see the progression of material changes from the simple white box to wood veneer and finally painted sheetrock.

 
This second set of architectural renderings shows a change in form as well as some material changes, and then finally, some detail tweaks.  Can you tell what’s changed?

This third set shows the progression of form much more dramatically.  You can see how the original design intention changed over several design reviews in both form and material.  I think the final design was well worth the changes.

Accident Reconstruction

Most of us are familiar with the use of 3D work in movies, video games and commercials,
But there is an increasing demand for its use in less traditional areas.  For years portrait artists have been used in the courtroom but with demand for more true to life reenactments and virtual timelines the role of the 3D artist is expanding.  The more complicated the case the more demand is placed on the quality of the exhibits.  Attorneys, like the movie go-er and the gamers, want high quality, realistic and detailed graphics and animations to use as they present their arguments.

READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY »

BlueLime Goes to Boston!

While we’ve been going to the local Georgia and regional
conventions for awhile now, we’ve finally decided to make the
jump to the National AIA (American Institute of Architects) convention. The AIA national
convention takes place in Boston this year, from
May 15th until the 17th. We’ll be in booth #23039, so if you’re
going make sure to look out for us — we’ll have plenty of
our world famous squeeze limes on hand! If you want passes
to the expo, let us know, and we can hook you up with some
for free. Email info@Bluelime.com and we’ll send some out.

Blu-Ray on the cheap (as long as your client’s Blu-Ray player supports it)

This may be old news to some of you tech heads (some of who may still be crying over the demise of HD-DVD). The Blu-Ray platform may require beefy computers, lots of drive space, ram, etc; but that doesn’t mean you have to spend a ton on blank Blu-Ray media. The Blu-Ray laser is backwards compatible with standard DVD’s (yes DVD-R). As long as at full 1080p resolution your content is less than ~20 minutes on a single layer DVD, or ~40 minutes on a dual-layer DVD, some Blu-Ray set top players can playback high resolution content that is burned on regular DVD-R’s!

A client of ours signed on to have a 3d architectural animation done in HD, and wants it displayed in his office in Blu-Ray format. After doing a little research I came across information that the Blu-Ray laser is capable of reading information burned on a standard DVD which has data written in a less compact format than would be on a Blu-Ray disc. The trick is, having software that can make a “burn folder” as well as burning straight to a disc. If you are familiar with the file structure of regular DVD’s you’d remember the old Audio_TS and Video_TS folders. The same thing goes for Blu-Ray formatted discs- they have a much different and more complicated file structure which is written out of the Blu-Ray authoring software and recognized by the player, in a sense fooling it into believing it’s a Blu-Ray disc and thus playing the content.

So instead of using precious Blu-Ray blank discs at 20-50 dollars per disc (depending on capacity) to burn test runs or dailies for clients, you can use regular old DVD-Rs that are cheap as dirt! The set top player we are using is the higher end Sony unit, which I can confirm will play the blank DVD-R we tested. I’m not sure if Sony has enabled the PS3 to play burned Blu-Ray discs yet, or if any of the other players by other manufacturers will do this.

Interior Lighting for Architectural renderings

Interior spaces are one of the most difficult spaces to illuminate and render. 

If you were to place yourself inside a box with no windows or holes, without light, it would be completely dark. Next, imagine having only two lights sources from above. The intensity of those two lights would have to be very strong to illuminate the space before you could make out any visible corners in the room. The best option for a good source of light is to create a window or opening that would allow in a sufficient amount of sun light, including the two light sources. The problem with most interior renderings is that windows tend to allow too much light into the space and end up overexposing the rendering.

The two images shown below exemplify the perspective of illuminating with and without windows. The Regency 1111 Lobby project shows how much exterior lighting (or sunlight) helps to illuminate a space with minimal use of interior incandescent lights. The sunlight enriches the interior space, which helps towards our goal of creating a realistic architectural rendering the colors of the tile and the reflection of the glass are so prominently highlighted that the interior lighting simply helps casts shadows and accent the important architectural features.

The architectural rendering of the Condo master bathroom is a prime example of dealing with no exterior lighting. The architectural drawings called for no exterior windows in the bathroom which lead to no exterior lighting and a difficult space to illuminate. In order to effectively illuminate the bathroom, we used a total of 13 lights with varying degrees of intensity. A huge factor that leads to the use of many lights at a high intensity is the material selection. The client chose to have a very dark space with dark furniture and dark finishes, which in turn, creates the difficulty level of illumination even more extreme. A dark space, alongside spaces without windows makes it very hard to show the illumination of that space. It eradicates the majority of light cast, causing the intensity to be much higher than normal or having to use an overabundance of lights placed in the space. The Condo project put up a good challenge to our lighting crew.

Overall, we’d prefer the easiest road to illumination, but we’d never back down from the challenge to illuminate a dark box with no windows or openings.