Construct

STORY

Around 2014 my good friend Kevin Margo aproached me to see if I would like to help him with his animated short Construct which was supposed to be fully rendered on GPUs. I worked on Kevin while I was at Blur, he was CG supervisor on many projects I worked on and we had a great relationship working together on projects, so I said yes and that's where our collaboration on the Construct begun. I was main environment modeler on that short working on majority of props, from modeling, texturing to final scene dressing. Some other elements of the environments like the trailer, hovercraft and some smaller parts of the environment were done by other artist.

TECHNICAL

Since we had to use only GPU's for this project it was a little bit of struggle in the beginning since at that time even the most advanced consumer based cards had only 6Gb of memory which was sometimes not enough to store all the data. V-Ray which we used for rendering still didn't have any out of core caching techniques, so basically once you hit that 6Gb memory limit that was it. Later, because of some sponsorship from nVidia we got a better cards with 12Gb of memory which was worked much better and made the whole experience more fluid. This was basically my first introduction into GPU rendering world, and I must say it was an eye opening experience. I knew sooner or later, becaue of GPU's speed, offline rendering will be slowly shifting towards GPU rendering, which is basically what happened during the next 6 years. Although CPU rendering is still used in VFX and other areas, GPU's are also being widely used on many projects and those memory limitation that were once a problem were less important today because many GPU renders utilize out of core architecture, giving them ability to render huge scenes.

ADDITIONAL IMAGES