CGSociety has a great interview with Kevin Margo of Blur Studios where they discuss some of the hurdles they’ve come across in recent projects. Recent projects like Firefall, Knights Contract, and Dante’s Inferno began to hit the limits of their rendering capabilities, so they began investigating new products.
“We had RAM issues on large environments without a functioning proxy system, render times were rising unacceptably high attempting to resolve sampling and GI flickering, vector moblur and Z-Depth DOF in post started to feel very dated,” he said. “Blur Studio had occasionally used V-Ray on a few small scale projects, and the results highlighted on those projects were VERY appealing to us. Seeing how V-Ray could easily produce creamy smooth GI lighting, camera DOF and motion blur, fast displacements and BSP instancing/proxy objects caught my attention.”
Blur Studio has really made a name for themselves with their amazing in-game cinematics that show up in Transformers, Mass Effect, and even the new Star Wars MMO coming from Bioware. Many people don’t realize that they almost exclusively use Autodesk’s 3ds Max to create them. Over at MaxUnderground, they interview Blur co-founder David Stinnett about the current state of the CG industry and how it’s evolved.
What is your view of the current state of the CG field? Do you feel it is as exciting as it was 10-20 years ago, or has innovation basically slowed down these past few years?
The 90′s were definitely a big time for CG development. I remember there was new stuff, new programs, plugins, new ways of doing things coming out all the time. When a new version of the software came out (3ds/Max especially), we would all gather around, giddy with excitement playing with the cool new features (yes, we were geeks). Nowadays there is not as much to drool over in new releases, as far as brand new innovative things. That is not to say things have gone stagnant. Advances in rendering, image based lighting, hardware acceleration are all exciting, especially as the hardware gets faster and faster.
I had the opportunity to see this earlier this week at an event with Tim Miller celebrating the 20th anniversary of 3dsMax. This trailer was created by Blur Studios for Bioware, to accompany the upcoming release of the new Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. Made entirely in 3dsMax, it’s action packed and beautiful.
You definitely want to watch it in one of the HD offerings.
CGSociety has a great interview with Kevin Margo of Blur Studios where they discuss some of the hurdles they’ve come across in recent projects. Recent projects like Firefall, Knights Contract, and Dante’s Inferno began to hit the limits of their rendering capabilities, so they began investigating new products.
Blur Studio has really made a name for themselves with their amazing in-game cinematics that show up in Transformers, Mass Effect, and even the new Star Wars MMO coming from Bioware. Many people don’t realize that they almost exclusively use Autodesk’s 3ds Max to create them. Over at MaxUnderground, they interview Blur co-founder David Stinnett about the current state of the CG industry and how it’s evolved.
An impressive video of a planetary implosion done by Mark Theriault while he worked for Blur over the course of three weeks. The specs:
VizWorld.com 
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