The scene you've provided with the rollover looks very simple and yet appears very realistic. What steps do you go through to go from a simple "plastic" render to make a photorealistic one?

Mats: We let radiosity do the work :) For the interior images we sometimes use up to about 3 and 4 bounces on the radiosity settings. This gives us necessary depth in the lighting situation. In older LightWave versions it was a lot harder to achieve realistic ambient lighting in spaces with little light. The "shading noise reduction" is also very useful in almost every project we do.

We usually surround the buildings with some sort of a dome and a couple of images of the surroundings. Also Skytracer is a very powerful tool with its ability to produce lighting situations at certain times of the day and year. For stills, we spend a lot of time editing in Photoshop. It pays to cut down on tweaking in LightWave and do the rest in compositing.

I assume that in this picture to the right, the LightWave stuff is the three big buildings on the waterfront?

Mats: Yeah, that is correct. In this project photorealism wasn't the primary goal. As you can see the model is also pretty rough. There are almost no textures either besides basic surface settings like transparency and so on. This was used to illustrate the dimensions of the buildings and how their volumes would work alongside the existing building mass. So with a minimum of work our client got more than he asked for, and that is an important rule when you want to keep you clients coming back to you.

I really liked the light study in the vaulted hall. Was that all LightWave, or compositing with live action?

Trond: It's all pure LightWave :)

(MPEG - 6.7 MB)

Have you got it at a better quality at all?

Nope. Really sorry. The movie was just a small test render, but it turned out too good to throw away. We have been planning a better version for about a year :( There is too much to do for the two of us these days. Keep checking our website for the update ;)

The Maserati animation is also great.

Mats: The Maserati was an in-house project and it's not used by Maserati... I hope... We tried to contact them, but haven't heard a thing from them since... The reason why we did it was that we wanted to expand beyond working with architecture... It turned out well I think. A guy called Lewis that you already interviewed here made the original model, we just used it for the animation.

(MPEG - 12.1 MB)

Mats: Have you got the maserati-film in "hi-res"? If not, you can find it at: http://www.nordalliansen.no/maserati/

What are you working on at the moment?

Mats: Different stuff. As usual the majority of the workload is architecture-related. We have a lot of new customers these days, including Norway's biggest furniture-producer and some big players in the field of architecture (With big being relative since we work out of Norway ;) )
Somehow people contact us over more and more design-related work. We have just finished three TV-commercials and we are working on four or five different architectural visualisation projects (primarily residential) and a show for something called Designers Saturday.

Trond: Looks as if we have to expand...

Mats: Yeah, looks like :)

Trond: Hehe.