The empty chair

In our industry we face a lot of time spent on waiting. Waiting for colleagues to finalize the job they are assigned to, clients to return with approvals or maybe new great ideas to appear from the brainstorm.

Some of this waiting is annoying and some is probably part of something maturing.

Our 3D department has really been dealing with the annoying waiting experience. Not so much the waiting for lay-outs to be ready or basic LOD files to be delivered from clients or suppliers - somehow that goes with the territory. No, it's the waiting for 3D scenes to be rendered to go into the next work flows of 3D. Since we work with extremely detailed stills with a lot of layers and products in 3D with an incredible amount of data the files we render are enormous. And we don't have a full blow 3D render set-up. Therefore the render time has exploded and we have examples of render time of 50 hrs. because we had to deal with renders that didn´t work out as planned and we would have to do it all again.

Below you see Martin or rather his empty chair, empty because he had to spend time waiting to continue his work.

Fortunately Martin is a not only a 3D artist - he is a creative one and he set off to solve the problem. He (and we) invested 2 weeks of programming and another week of adjustment. His 3D colleagues were covering his back doing all 3D work during the period. Martin invented a new render principle were Martin and his 3D colleagues could divide the render into layers rendered individually. Thereby the render time could be reduced to app. 2 hrs. and a lot of frustration was removed from the proces.

To be honest it wasn't easy to find the 2 -3 weeks and Martin couldn't guarantee that it would work. But it did.

Martin took charge of a problem that could have been lost in a discussion of wether we have the right gear or software or not. And we all ran the risk of not knowing if it worked. That is how progress is made and creativity flourish. Thx Martin and the 3D team.