Archviz tips and tricks from BOC Studio

Last month, we introduced you to Nguyen Duong Thanh, 3D artist and Founder of BOC Studio, and how they use Anima 4D human models in their projects. Now that the holiday season is approaching, we've teamed up with BOC again to bring you some early presents under the tree and share some heartwarming Vietnamese traditions with you. So, what are these gifts? They're none other than helpful visual storytelling tips, Phoenix testing tricks, and some inspiration for creating captivating architectural films. Get ready to unwrap them as you keep reading! 🎁 

Santa baby, put a new graphics card under the tree

Let’s speak hardware. BOC’s hardware configuration is as follows:

• 128Gb Ram
• RTX 3090
• SSD NVMe 1TB (OS - Software).
• SSD NVMe 2TB (Projects)
• SSD NVMe 8TB ( Simulation: Phoenix, GrowFx v.v…)

In BOC’s studio, the configurations of the other machines are quite similar, sometimes the CPU is a 12th or 13th-generation Intel Core i9.

Before fully transitioning to Chaos Vantage, BOC used to render with a V-Ray CPU, and the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3975WX proved to be an excellent choice price-wise. It struck a good balance between clock speed for modeling work and a high core count for rendering. Having a powerful CPU also sped up testing and simulations with software like Phoenix or GrowFx. Later on, for rendering, BOC primarily used Chaos Vantage with GPUs, and the RTX 3090 with 24GB of VRAM is an excellent choice.

The 24GB VRAM provides ample resources to handle large or complex scenes. Just check out the video below – a very large scene that BOC managed to render effectively by consuming a little over 12GB of VRAM.

Crafting a testing strategy 

When testing out software to figure out the right approach for each animation, BOC’s primary strategy is always grounded in observation and research. Here are the steps they went through when testing out Phoenix’s capabilities:

1. Real-life Reference: They always began by examining real-world effects to gain a clear understanding of what they aimed to recreate in Phoenix.
2. Resource Utilization: After pinpointing the exact elements of the effect they wished to simulate, their next step was to refer to Chaos's documentation page. This provided them with essential tutorials and parameters related to the desired effects.
3. Starting Simple: Their initial tests were executed on a basic box setup, unrelated to the main project. This is mainly to gauge Phoenix's parameters against their scene's scale.
4. Quality Increment: Once comfortable with the initial results, they would elevate the simulation quality to ensure enhanced precision in the effects. However, an essential learning point was the need to sometimes accept minor imperfections, especially with complex and multi-faceted effects which can be time-consuming to simulate again.
5. Separate Rendering: For some archviz projects, BOC would render individual effects like fire, smoke, or water separately. This allowed them greater flexibility in post-production, where they would combine these sequences using After Effects for the desired outcome.