Solitude
1996-98
People who know me know Solitude. This was the first "real" 3D project I ever worked on, came with my first Macintosh-contact and, of course, my very first grown out 3D package, Electric Image. I worked on this during an internship at scopasFilm, now scopas Medien AG, and were supposed to finish modelling, texturing, rendering and programming on that title.
Solitude is an actual solitude near Stuttgart, Germany. That´s a sort of castle built only for party and pleasure, not for much else. These days the two wings housean arts-academy for writers, painters and others, a restaurant, the chapel is still used for weddings and the core piece is open for visitors.
The idea was to create a multimedia CD where the user can walk the place via Quicktime and QuicktimeVR, and in doing so continually slips from the actual filmed reality into more and more abstract and rotten ones, thus incorporating a 3D-model of the place. Modelling was done in Amapi 2.11 - 3.0, the rest was Electric Image 2.5-2.9, Macromedia Director, MPW-shell scripting and 2D applications like AfterFX for stabilizing. Unfortunately, the project was only a pet-project, and thus never quite finished. But it was nevertheless a landmark for myself. I worked on a PowerMac 9500 with 240 MB RAM and 200 MHz from 1996-98, doing several commercial, but less pleasing projects along the way.
The Tree was done via Onyx Tree. This is a frame of the only PAL-flyaround I ever did.
Yes, this is primarily ambient light. Back then it seemed to be a good idea, nowadays I´d light more carefully. But then the renderings can´t take forever.
Solitude being a multimedia project, I also rendered some Quicktime Panoramas. The hot-spots are naturally not linked to any movies here.
And finally, a frame from the stabilized real-movie sequences:
Credits:
Concept: Jan Bonath, Thomas Hettche, Peter Ruch
Camera: Reiner Krausz
3D and Programming: Jan Bonath, Stefan Biercamp and Christoph Scherer