Our latest artist showcase comes to you from China, the most populous nation on earth. From the wide open and empty panoramas of Tibet to the push and shove of Shanghai, a journey through this colossus of a country is a mesmerising encounter. China's coastline glitters with some of the world's most up-to-the-minute cities, encouraging forward-thinking dynamism and yet at the same time still holding onto the past with equal vigor. So today we find ourselves lucky enough to be in the Futian District, of Shenzhen to meet up with Chen Jing, partner at Sunup CG.
P3D - Chen please do introduce yourself to our readers. CJ - My name is Chen Jing, some of my friends call me Jim, or Chen. I was born in Wuhan, a big city in the middle of China, and I grew up there until graduating from University. My major at University was Architecture, but because I love computer techniques and art as much as architectural design, instead of turning to be an architect, I became an artist of architectural visualization. I now run an architectural visualization company, Sunup CG; previously known as OP Digital; with my two partners and today we employ 120 people. P3D - Chen can you tell us so what is the primary software used these days at Sunup CG? Chen - Most artists in my company use 3DS max. P3D - For final renders do you use Mental ray or another rendering engine? Chen - We tried some different rendering engines and we found Vray is the most efficient one, and we are now using it for most of our work. P3D - What other application do you use in addition to 3DS Max? Chen - Some post production software, for stills and animations, post production is a very important step during our working process.
P3D - How long does a typical visualization or animation take? Chen - Different scales take us different effort and time. A visualization of a small project takes about 3 days, usually including communication. For animation, it's hard to say, usually 1-4 weeks, mostly 3 weeks. Our record on shortest turnaround time is half a week. P3D - Do you personally get time to work on 3DS Max these days? Chen - Unfortunately most of my time is now spent managing the company, it is difficult for me to find time to make some work myself with 3DS Max. P3D - How did you learn to use 3DS Max yourself? Chen - I learnt it myself and from help from my colleagues. I also learnt many things from Internet. The Internet is a really good tool. P3D - When you had the time to produced your own work, did you prefer interior scenes or exterior? Chen - No, I didn't have special preference, both were and are still interesting for me. P3D - Sunup CG has been a great success how much International work do you do these days? Chen - About half of our work is from international clients and half from domestic clients.
P3D - Do you find working for clients in the US or Europe a challenge? Chen - The first time we start working for overseas clients five years ago, we did not consider it as a challenge. Yes, some requests from overseas clients are different from domestic clients, but that was not an issue. When we got more and more projects from Europe and US and other overseas areas, we found our challenge was communicating on many projects over a long distance via internet instead of working face to face, which we do with domestic clients. So we set up a professional team taking charge of communication between our overseas clients and production teams. We also set up an efficient working process and use many other supplementary means to help our co-operation with overseas clients. P3D - Are there any communication problems due to time differences with clients? Chen - To work together with overseas client sometime is very good, because we are half a day earlier than US, and about seven hours earlier than Europe time, so sometime we can work very efficiently. Our clients design or do edits at their daytime and we work at their night time, which means they can see their request to be done as soon as they get up the 2nd day. But sometime this time difference brings us trouble, because when we have questions we cannot communicate with our clients conveniently, if we cannot figure out ourselves, we have to wait till our night time. Fortunately, we have so many years of experience, so mostly; we know how to deal with this situation. P3D - How much creative freedom do you have when working on projects, or do your clients decide on camera angles and focus areas? Chen - Usually there is a discussing step, clients for sure have their thoughts and request, and we have our experience and ideas, which of course we need to get clients' approval.
P3D - How are your teams set up? Chen - Our Company now has about 120 employees including an animation department with five animation teams, a rendering department with one interior team and two exterior teams, a Multimedia and Virtual Reality team, a non-architecture team. In the very beginning, we were only a 3 people studio with 3 computers and a small office. P3D - Is most of your work architecturally based? Chen - Not only architecturally work, we also make scenes for game, commercials, some character animations and we also shoot footage for some projects, make motion graphic, etc. One of our new business directions is multi-channel projection with an inter-active system on oversize screen, which is for presentations or exhibitions in museums. P3D - What area of CGI are you concentrating on or improving in the next 12 months? Chen - Besides normal projects, to compare with other CG companies, we are especially good at big or huge scale projects, like a whole city, or similar scale, or something no one has done before. Now besides what we usually do and the super wide circle oversize screen technology we have excogitated and popularized successfully, we are now concentrating on Virtual Reality technology for big scale projects. We are now working on a huge VR project for a city in China, which needs us to build the entire city in 3D, the total land area is more than 400 square Km. P3D - Did you find your work flow had to change much to suit VR? Production?Chen - Yes, we have to use different working mode to suit VR software and some different needs. P3D - What techniques do you use to put people into your animations and visuals? Chen - More and more clients accept those 3D people we use for animations and renderings, though they do not look so realistic, the lighting, sizes and perspective of them can match the 3D scenes very well. For our high end projects, some time we use green screen people. P3D - What has been your most exciting project to work on to date and why? Chen - Recently, we have been working on some very big scale city design projects in Dubai, which look very cool and are full of imagination. Some of the buildings have a very creative look, and in our animations, we put in a lot of detail, so these animations look realistic and beautiful. P3D - When working on an animation across a whole city, how do you work with such large files? Chen - Computer hardware and software we keep updating, which makes it easier for us to handle big scale scenes than before. Of course, we still need to use our experience to optimize the models, including how to use low resolution models for those scenes, in which the city is in a far distance. To do this increases production time, but it make us able to produce bigger scale scenes.
P3D - Are you finding the CGI market in China very competitive at the moment? Chen - Not really, in fact I have to say China is a really big market, even though there are so many CG companies. We still have many clients, and many of them have co-operated with us for years. Sometimes we even have to turn down new clients, I am sorry about this, but we have to make sure we can do our job well first. We are now planning to expand our team, on the premise that we can guarantee the quality. P3D - How has the credit crunch and global turndown effected your business? Chen - I believe this crisis has affected every corner of the world, so do we, but sooner or later, everything will get back to normal, and the crisis helps us to optimize our working and managing method, which I think is not bad at all. P3D - If you could have one feature in 3DS Max what would it be? Chen - I wish it could read my mind. Kidding. P3D - What do think will be the biggest change in software and the industry over the next five years? Chen - Everything is getting more are more complex. P3D - What do you think makes a successful CG business? Chen - Many factors, but I think the most important of all is that you have to love CG. Well with such a great and appropriate final answer we have sadly run out of time. Thank you Chen for your time and we wish you and everyone at Sunup CG every success in the future. Copyright 2009, PlanIt 3D | |||||
