Computer Graphics World

If 18 months ago you would have told David Burgess that he would consid er a 3D computer graphics tool "brilliant" and able to inspire "incredible creativity," he might have laughed in your face. Burgess, an internationally known auto motive photographer, is no Luddite. He was among the first wave of professional photographers to go digital, and calls that movement "a revelation, offering possi bilities unheard of in film." Until recently, though, Burgess had resisted the marriage of photography and 3D CGI—and, ac cording to him, for good reasons. "I explored CGI, looking into [Au todesk's] Maya and other programs, but found them to be nonintuitive and un creative," says Burgess. "[CG] was the do main of technicians. I didn't want to do the equivalent of going back to a university in order to learn one of those programs." Burgess's opinions changed approxi mately a year ago when he was working on a project for Ford Motor Company. Jennifer Flake, the company's director of global brand imaging and design for pub lic affairs, wanted to show the media the Ford Inceptor concept car in a realworld environment. e only obstacle was that the car had not been built yet—a situa tion Burgess was unaware of when he ar rived for the photo shoot in Las Vegas. Burgess and his assistant shot back grounds at a neonsign graveyard outside the city. en, using a spherical camera, they shot highdynamic range (HDR) images, which provided a 360degree panorama of the location with complete lighting data. e duo brought the photos and data back to the hotel, where Burgess, using a ren dering program from Bunkspeed, merged CAD models of the concept car with his justcaptured digital photography files. Within hours, Burgess had created five complete images, with the car fully integrat ed into the scenery, reflecting the surround ing environment and taking advantage of the captured light from the HDR images to generate highlights on the car and natural shadows."It was staggering that I could do this so quickly with software I had never used before," says Burgess. "I had the free dom to exercise creativity and pursue my own style without compromising quality. I was able to render the images in hours on a laptop, something that might have ordi narily taken days using a renderfarm." Fresh Look at CGI According to Burgess and fellow auto motive photographers Michael Lee, Nigel Harniman, and Vic Huber, the Bunk speed software, called HyperShot, war ranted a fresh look at how photography can be used with CGI. Unlike traditional programs, originally intended for creating images and anima tions from scratch, HyperShot is designed exclusively for working with photos and HDR data. After shooting the back ground plate and HDR photos and load ing them into HyperShot, the user im ports a 3D car model from any standard 3D DCC software, including native data from popular CAD programs. Next, the person applies materials, color, and surface textures using a palette within the software. en, he or she chooses an HDR map to provide the lighting, adds the backplate image, and adjusts the virtual camera for lens type, angle, rotation, and distance. "I had spent a lot of time in the past looking to add CGI capabilities through Maya and 3ds Max," says Lee, who has done advertising work for Honda and MercedesBenz, among others. "It took a lot of time to modify materials, and a great deal of expertise to get the quality I needed. Even with hardware acceleration using 32 processors, rendering a single image typi cally took as long as 12 hours. "[Now I can] quickly get to the fun part of the process for any photographer: light ing," Lee adds. "Photographers are often called upon to consult on lighting, so it's great to have this much control over that aspect. e rendering is optimized, so what took me 12 hours with 32 processors can be rendered in two hours at the same or greater quality on a Mac quadcore system." Interactive Photorealism HyperShot's architecture was designed from the start to take advantage of new technol ogy and hardware developments. e en gineers started from a clean slate, aided by Henrik Wann Jensen, Bunkspeed's chief scientist, who is known for his photon mapping algorithms that make it possible to realistically simulate effects, such as caus tics, diffuse interreflection, and natural phenomena, including smoke and fire. Automotive photographer David Burgess used Bunkspeed's HyperShot software to place a CAD model of the Ford Explorer America concept car in US location shots. April 2009 39 Mixed Media n n n n

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