How much of this does Virtualscape do? The LightWave images of course, but the Flash work? The PDFs?

All of it. We have an in-house design facility, actually a sister company in-house, called CG Labs

And for Homestead, for example, how long was the turnaround?

Entire project, from concept to Viz to Design and implement, .... hmm.... about two weeks (but three would also have been nice. We’re at the end of the proverbial food-chain and turnaround times are almost always hectic).

Wow, how many folk working on it?

Two on modelling, one on blueprints, one on texturing, two on design, and a helluva lot of rendering behind it.

...and just how do you get them to do two weeks of 25-hour days?

hehehe, no we try and get some sleep some time. We've one guy in the office that just handles the traffic. The typical working day is no longer than 10-hour shifts. We do however have a day and evening shift happening, so the company pretty much runs 20 hours a day

That must take some seriously military-style organisation. No wonder you want to keep Layout and Modeler separate!

This was the only solution to a very demanding market.

Does the speed of LightWave make a difference to your work?

LightWave allows us to work at such a rate and is a low enough cost per seat to allow us to significantly undercut competition around the world.

With such a tight turnaround, do you use radiosity?

Yup, most of the time, we find it takes less time to just get into rendering than trying to fake it, however, radiosity isn't something that should take that long. we've found some formulas that really give a great result and work quite quickly

Exteriors are always going to be fine anyway, but don't interior shots pose problems for your deadlines? Especially with multi-bounce radiosity?

The dining room image below, rendered at print resolution had four area lights, seven spots, one point light and three bounces... It took about 12 hours to render. Renders sometimes end up a bit grainy but programs like Neat Image were invented for that purpose.

With such a lot of rendertime within a deadline do you do all rendering in-house?

No, if we have large sequences we need done, we've recently started an affiliation program with a UK based rendering company called Render-IT, so we kinda make it their problem. With the stills, well, there's not many ways around it - one machine, one image, hold thumbs and see what it looks like tomorrow.

Is your head modeller your brother?

Yeah, he used to work for TBWA (ad agency) as an art director. about a year ago I asked him whether he would like to join our team as a good visual is more than just clever 3D tricks. I think it paid off.

Thanks for chatting with us Christo and we'll keep you posted on the foot spa issue. Everyone should have a look at the example site Christo posted us to, and also Virtualscape's own website.