Rudskogen Motorcenter - Jørgen Holo

Fact File Name Jørgen Holo Product Vue, Rhino, Photoshop "The most important thing to do is to have fun and at the same time try and achieve goals that are too big."

Preview of the new track

Jørgen Holo is a 34 year old Industrial Designer who runs a small company called Holografisk. The main focus of the company is product and graphic design, visualisation, reselling 3D software and training. The company hires in other people on a project basis. Almost all animations are cooperations with Petter Peikli, a great artist and director.

Background

I’ve worked professionally with 3D graphics since 1998 and discovered Vue in 2005 through pure luck (or was it 3D magazine?) and quickly downloaded the demo and fell in love. I purchased Vue d’Esprit 4 soon after. I quickly upgraded to Vue 5 when it was released and then upgraded to Pro Studio and Vue 5 Infinite as these versions became available. Now I work with Vue6 xStream of course.

What I fell in love with was the intuitive and inspiring way to work with landscapes, and the fact that Vue generates 3D items that I can discard or alter until I get it like I want it. The GUI is great and the entire idea of hiding all the difficult settings behind sliders is excellent. I wish more 3D software was like this.

And of course I like the fact that Vue supports so many new features. If a new rendering feature appears in the market, then Vue supports it shortly after. And they always work great, give good results with minimal effort from the artist and they calculate fast!

I could not be without the possibility to import objects and populate them with the EcoSystem. The presets are great value, since it is super fast to test out different settings and then alter the preset to come closest to what I want.

I would like to learn advanced material handling like making foaming water along a shore and getting to know and master the function editor.

My inspiration comes from all over the place, sometimes through music, through experiences, through research or by chance. Ryan Church and Santiago Calatrava are two artists I highly respect. But keeping a positive approach to life, having fun and being social is what makes me get as much inspiration as possible.

The Project

The project was done for Rudskogen Motorcenter who planned to expand their tracks. They had used the amazing architect Tilke and they wanted to show the investors how great his plans would look like. So we took all the 2D material and recreated the terrain, modified it to suit the plans, built the houses and all the accessories, created a population map for the trees and started planning the animations.

From the start of the project until the five animations were done it took about ten work days. Two of us worked on them, Petter Peikli and me. None of us had much experience with CG animations, but being from so different backgrounds we were able to supplement each other very vell.

Petter has lots of experience with storytelling and manipulating the viewers emotions through camera handling, sound and overall atmosphere. I have experience in design presentation, 3D modeling and know the basics of animation. Most project visualisations like this lack the extra layer of emotion, and they seem dull or uninspiring. And we think we managed to make these animations interesting.

Petter Peikli always makes both written and hand drawn storyboards before we start animating. This is a great advantage since we discuss and alter them together with the customer before we start animating. That way we get a much better result and the customer knows what we will deliver.

All the terrain, buildings and accessories except the F1 car was built in Rhino. We altered the height curves to suit the new tracks and then used a terrain plugin to convert the height curves to a mesh, and the mapping was of course created in Photoshop.

The hardest thing to do was animation the F1 car that drives around the track since the car drives the ideal track at ideal time. We could not use the simplified animation wizard since the car fell through the terrain at odd places, so we had to manually animate the entire lap. (You can see the car goes above and below the ground at some places). The biggest challenge was reaching the deadline since we wanted the animation to look as good as possible.

The entire scene has 980 million polygons, 22,000 trees, was rendered with GI at low settings over 5 P4 computers and everything worked great. I use 5 machines for rendering and teaching, and they are all Core2Duo, 2GB machines that run WindowsXP.

One lap following a F1

Tips and tricks to share with the community.

I think the most important thing to do is to have fun and at the same time try and achieve goals that are too big. Remember that most clients are impressed if you are satisfied, so when you present your work always act satisfied. The customer deserves to feel that you, the artist, likes the work. And work with people that know stuff you don’t. Preferably people who don’t know the limits of the software and who have vision.

Current Projects

We are currently working on an animation for a ship company that has some very interesting aid plans. Another motorpark just contacted us, and we are working on constructing a bridge, designing a boat, and a bbq. I just finished some design for a custom built beetle for NRK, the national TV channel. So we do many different things.