Times have changed
Posted in: News - Wednesday, February 10 2010
In 1997 I was asked to create a 3D graphic of a proposed concept for the Raffles Hotel, superimposed over a photographed background. Quite a common thing now, but back then very few people could do it. Most concept visuals back then were painted by an artist.
The developer supplied me with architects plans and elevations printed on paper -these days I would usually get a computer file from a CAD program. As the image was to be printed out at poster size, I took a professional photographer with a large format camera to various points on the river and took some background photos. Nowadays I would be out there myself with a 12 megapixel digital camera. The photos we took then were on massive pieces of slide film which had to be professionally scanned and then imported into Photoshop, and the file size was so big that I used to make a cup of tea in the time it took to refresh the screen after any changes.
Extrapolating Moore’s law which states that computer CPU speeds double every 18 months, computers nowadays should be about 500 times faster than they were then. If you include other advances in hardware and software than we’re probably talking about 1000 times quicker. In the hands of a good operator, the realism achievable with CGI now is indistinguishable from reality.
Check out the film “Avatar”. How times have changed.
