Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/398245
30 cgw s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 4 M O D E L I N G . 3 D P R I N T I N G least that was my hunch." For more than a century people have commented on the photographic quality of Vermeer's paintings, created approximately 200 years prior to the invention of photography. Indeed, there was a great deal of speculation about the use of a camera obscura, yet there seemed to be a missing step. "I was in the bathtub one day and this idea came to me out of the blue, that you can paint on top of a projection, in a manner of speaking, if you used a mirror [aside from the camera obscura]," Jenison says. "With the extra mirror, you can trace colors onto shapes – you are basically making a photograph." Jenison devised a crude setup in his kitchen and tested his hypothesis. "It worked amazingly well," he says. "It was the first time I ever oil-painted, and it came out looking like a photograph." Intrigued, Jenison searched the Internet for similar test results but came up empty- handed. To prove that his theory indeed had merit, Jenison had to paint under the same condi- tions that Vermeer did, and that meant precisely re-creating the studio room the master artist used while painting. And, that room was laid out in Vermeer's artwork. The dimensions. The lighting. The objects in the room. But, how does one measure a room that no longer exists, let alone determine how light spilled across it? And, where does a person find a 350-year- old harpsichord and other 17th century furnishings? M A K I N G A P R E D I C T I O N To determine if Vermeer painted the wall a little too realistically in his works, Jenison modeled a few of the paintings using his company's LightWave 3D so- ware. Although involved in the soware's development from day one, he had never done any ambitious modeling or anima- tion with the program, so the project gave him an opportu- nity to learn a good deal about LightWave and its tool set. "I had a cram session on LightWave, and I learned the nooks and crannies of Light- Wave that no one ever sees," he says. Then he began to notice that the same people seemed to appear in the artist's work, a theory he verified in LightWave since he now had a complete 3D model of the objects and sub- jects. "I had an accurate model of this woman, and I could turn her head to a different angle to see if it matched the person in another painting, and found out, yeah, it did," Jenison says. "And it was the same woman in several of the pictures." In LightWave, Jenison added a painting to the background in Layout, and then worked in the soware by overlaying the 3D objects on the background image. He repeated this process for several paintings until all the sizes and shapes in 3D meshed with those Vermeer painted. Then he tried to light the images, to see how well the LightWave version matched the painting as far as shading was concerned. According to Jenison, the point of this exercise was to take a closer look at the shading on the back wall, but LightWave – like most other 3D modeling packages not tuned specifically for architectural use – optimizes its lighting model and simplifies the way shading works. Simply put, LightWave is not used to simulate reality, but Jenison wanted to see if he could get the lighting to match the painting, which simulated ultra-reality. Simulating lighting properly requires full-on raytracing with lots of rays and bounces – and lots of time. "LightWave did not want to do this. I would turn up the number of rays and bounces to get an accurate rendering," he says. So, Jenison began building his own supercomputer with a server motherboard containing 24 cores, "and LightWave just pumped along." A renderfarm of 50 discarded NewTek TriCasters made the process even faster. "I needed to know how bright the [back] wall was at every single point," says Jenison. Aer nearly eight months, Jenison was able to get enough rays and bounces to reach a scientific-level image that ac- curately represented Vermeer's famed room. Facilitating this effort was the LightWave team, which he had at his disposal – in particular, Mark Granger, former co-founder of Electric Image. Another, Jarno van der Linden, (TOP) THE CG RENDERING OF THE MUSIC LESSON 3D MODEL CONTAINING REAL-WORLD MEASUREMENTS. (BOTTOM) JENISON PAINTS HIS VERMEER ROOM USING AN OPTICAL SETUP.