“With D5 Render, we not only get to meet the deadline, but also live up to clients' expectations. ”
—— An interview with Arthur Studio
Arthur Studio: Architecture visualization, animation making, BIM consulting, real estate development, landscape design, architecture planning, construction organization, municipal bridge design, etc.
Current Workflow: 3Ds Max + D5 Render(for animation), VRay(for still frame).
Reasons for changing the workflow
Let's just face it, still frame rendering alone can not satisfy our clients these days. In the era of short videos, rendering industry has followed suit. Clients tend to see the visualization moving, for animations do display the project more vividly and precisely. It goes without saying that animation also helps when bidding. Some may call it a result of fierce peer competition. Well, I believe this is the current trend, and we are going to follow it.
However, with more projects in progress came a shorter production period. That, to be honest, is a headache for us.
Luckily we discovered D5 Render. With D5, we not only get to meet the deadline, but also live up to clients' expectations. During the process, D5 has made it possible to improve our working efficiency and saved us a ton of time. Production takes less time to finish, and negotiation with clients gets much easier, which is exactly what we need with such a tight working schedule.
Let's take a look at a project we've done. We were assigned the Yinhe Cold Chain Industry Complex project with only 2 days for production. We first negotiated with the client, and they gave us some unexpected advice after seeing the demo. So the demo ended up needing a lot of changes including skyline, rescaling the vegetation and adjusting some assets. In that case, all of the cameras need to be rendered again, which, surprisingly, only took D5 several hours. We couldn't have made it without D5 Render.
Working with 3Ds Max and D5 Render
I first learned about D5 on a work-related forum last June. A peer worker shared his works rendered with D5, and that led me to search for what D5 Render is. At that time, D5 1.9 was in beta besting. I thought to myself: "why not give it a try?", and the outcome was quite surprising. After 2 months of testing, D5 was put into practical use in all my animation projects at hand. From then on D5 has been the first renderer I turned to for visualization.
For every project, it starts with modeling. Materials we get from clients usually include SketchUp models, CAD floor plans, but sometimes we get only part of the image information.
We would first deal with all the models needed in this project with Max.
Then, we export these models with D5 Converter - 3Ds Max as .d5a files into D5 Render for animation making.
The exporting process with D5 Converter makes our work much easier, and the workflow of 3Ds Max and D5 is such a convenience. As is often the case, we need to edit or change some of the models in the renderer, which can be quite time-consuming. Now, we just replace them with a click in D5.
After the modeling is confirmed, the project goes to rendering artist who is in charge of archviz and animation making.
And in this process, D5 strikes us as efficient and speedy.
For a 2-minute animation, we usually had to spend more than 10 days in making. The animation takes a long time to render, and we even had to send some of the cameras to rendering farms. These are all the costs of production. So we tried some of the real-time render engines, but they took 5-7 days. To be honest, rendering was such a laborious task.
However, D5 was able to shorten the time waiting for output and greatly improved our working efficiency. I got to spend more time digging into the production of animation including camera movement, detail of the scene, light and shade, material adjustment, etc. If I stuck to my previous workflow, then I couldn't have afforded the time for that. Now the whole process of animation making takes about 3 days, and short scenes take only one day to finish. (rendered with RTX 2060)
D5 does not compromise on rendering quality for a shorter rendering time. Quite the opposite, D5 impresses me with the best rendering quality among all the real-time renderers that I've used. How the materials and texture look in D5 is surprisingly close to the physical objects in real life.
Other than that, D5 has so much more to discover. Here's another thing that surprised me: I made models of light strips and trees with hanging string lights inside 3Ds Max, then exported them directly into D5 Render. See how they fit into the scene! You can see below. I've created my own local asset library in D5 and enriched its contents. As a Max user, I find it extremely easy and convenient. The imported models are orderly categorized and easily accessible for use in D5.
As anyone in this industry might know, working overtime or even through the night is part of our everyday life. D5 has really helped me in saving working time. Doing this job, we can't expect too much leisure, but I do have more free time to myself now. I use it either to better the production, or to give myself a rest. I used to dream of this work-life balance, and now I have it thanks to D5.
