How Chaos Vantage Improved Silkroad Digital Vision's Workflow

Discover how Chaos Vantage helps Silkroad Digital Vision collaborate on projects in realtime and get tips on how to achieve an impressive arch-viz scene. 

If you haven't yet heard of Silkroad Digital Vision, we're here to fill you in. Headquartered in the bustling and vibrant city of Shenzhen, it is one of the first visual technology companies to go public in China. Take a look at its incredible V-Ray rendered demo reel:

Recognized for its varied portfolio, the company handles multiple projects in arch-viz, urban planning, animation for film and television, and offers professional services in big data and cloud computing.  

We were thrilled when one of the company's talented arch-viz artists, Yi Xiang, agreed to present as a speaker at this year's 24 Hours of Chaos. He shares how his team relies on Chaos Vantage to achieve professional results in collaboration with clients all in realtime. Watch the video to relive the event, or keep reading for the highlights.  

Discovering Chaos Vantage 

Considering the company's wide range of projects, they always follow a process from concept to preview. Previewing the final render often leads to some problems because of the viewport of the 3D software. 

Let's take 3ds Max as an example. The volume of animation projects and scenes is always too large. There are too many geometries and faces that need to be hidden in the viewport. Also, communication problems can arise in this process. 

After artists have finished the scene, they naturally want to present it to their customers, but they can't display the lights and materials in the viewport, only where the objects were placed approximately. Before using Chaos Vantage, Yi Xiang would have to render a thumbnail and describe it verbally, providing additional concept drawings made in Photoshop for greater context. Of course, such a workaround is not ideal and as Yi Xiang points out, this can lead to miscommunication.  

2. With Vantage, we can make adjustments to the lighting directly in the scene. For example, if you want to control the sun and make it a little more intense, you can change the environment to a different HDR. In previous workflows, every time Yi Xiang would switch to another HDR, he would need to re-render, because the scene is too large, or he would need to select the area and do a region render in Virtual Frame Buffer (VFB).  

3. V-Ray IPR is already built into the 3ds Max viewport. But, because of huge scenes and the high number of polygons, it would be unrealistic to show them directly in IPR, and since the rendering load is too heavy, you have almost no way to edit the scene. With Vantage that's all avoided, and you can browse around your scene from the very beginning.  

Play around with perspective and depth of field 

Challenge yourself to look at and assess your scene from various viewpoints. Observe your building from the other side of the street, move up close and capture its reflection, or stretch the focal length of the camera, set the focus point and turn on depth-of-field. 

These may not seem like particularly special settings to fiddle around with, as many renderers display these options in their viewport. But with Vantage, it's far easier and faster to play with these camera effects and experiment with unusual angles, even when you're exploring scenes with many faces and complex geometries that require a large RAM to process.