Gone are the days of simple cutouts of people in static architectual visualizations! AXYZ Design studio is the leading innovator in archviz, bringing high-end dynamic assets and software to professional architects, the movie industry and everyone in between. In this interview, Diego Gadler, the CEO of AXYZ Design, shares his insights and experience in archviz, the blurring lines between games, VFX and archviz, and the huge potential of ANIMA – the first and widely used crowd simulator.
I started working on CG during my studies in Argentina. I got my degree at FADU UBA university of Architecture at Buenos Aires in 2000. Back then Argentina was in the middle of a big crisis, which eventually turned into an economical crash. Like many Argentinians who had Italian or Spanish parents and a double citizenship, I decided to move to Italy and look for better job opportunities.
I got great professional experience in a visualization company located in Siena, Tuscany, where I discovered a passion for photography. I remember taking tons of pictures of tourists visiting Piazza del Campo that we later cut out and pasted in Photoshop to populate renderings.
Rigged 3D models by AXYZ Design
This was a repetitive and very exhausting task, especially when clients decided to change perspectives and choose a new view point for the project. We had to repeat the cutting and pasting process again and again...
One weekend, instead of going to Piazza del Campo again, I stayed at home trying to model a 3D human figure. After many attempts, I perfected my first workflow to produce high quality 3D human assets in a reasonable period of time. In 2004, I opened the AXYZ online shop and started my business.
Since the beginning, AXYZ has been very innovative. At that time there were no similar products or solutions on the market, and Metropoly quickly became the industry standard.
The product was conceived to fulfill the real needs of many people working on visualization. Moving cameras and repeated rendering was now possible. The final result was a perfect integration of the 3D human figure with the scene and lighting.
Some years later, I started a new project called ANIMA. In 2011, AXYZ once again became the first company in the market to offer a unique tool for the archviz maker: crowd simulation. 3DWorld magazine has also defined ANIMA as the first commercial product of this type, many years before the Autodesk Populate tool.
Metropoly characters in 'New York Intersection' by Egor Goray and threedex.com, 2014
We wanted to always be one step ahead of everyone, and released the first collection of scanned people way back in 2012. Offering scanned data back then was considered “futuristic”!
Finally, last November, we released a new version of ANIMA, which offers the first crowd simulation solution for the Unreal Engine and allows artists to populate their scenes with stunning numbers of 3D moving people in very little time.
Innovation and research of new techniques and solutions always keeps us “one step ahead”.
I believe that the human figure is very important in architectural visualization. It communicates scale, activates our senses and perception of "inhabiting" a space.
During all of these years I've been looking for an answer as to why, when we look at an architecture magazine like Domus, El Croquis, or Architectural Review, human presence is almost non-existent. Every picture in architectural photography seems unnatural, almost as if the photographer wanted to achieve something artificial when capturing reality.
On the opposite side, CG artists are all trying to mimic reality, and to do it right, they need to show realistic people. Our daily mission is to develop reasonably priced and simple to use 3D people assets.
Scene by Mirče Mladenov
Probably most of the support issues we get every day are related to technical aspects. For this reason, we prioritize the development of ANIMA. The tool aims to allow “non technical” artists to populate a scene with ease.
Yes, every image an artist creates should be able to tell something. When we look at a rendering, we should be able to see a story. And to tell a story we need to have a method.
As in writing, you need to adhere to the rules of grammar, and to see that each word and sentence, when joined together, create a nice story. The same is true for a picture: you cannot populate it by simply copying and pasting objects.
Every time we place a tree, a vehicle, or a 3D people in our scene, we should try to make it speak and help us express something in our final image. At the end, it's all about communication.
Novice visualizers often forget about this.
The main different is how those successful CG artists are able to write their own stories in their own style.
All of us use the same combination of tools, more or less. The market has many good renderers and great assets accessible to everyone, therefore the right way to make better images is to try to and add extra value based on our artistic talent, to wake the senses of the person looking at our images.
'Working Hours' by Reinaldo Handaya
I think Archviz is evolving in two main areas:
On one side, we have an explosion of techniques and technological improvements. In the last 2 or 3 years, the borders between Archviz, VFX and Gaming have blurred and disappeared. There is a nice interchange between these historically separate CG disciplines that makes the actual panorama very interesting. Many Archviz artists are using gaming technologies like Unreal Engine or Unity to develop interactive and immersive experiences for presenting and exploring a building. Game studios are working with architects to develop more realistic and credible scenarios for games, while VFX compositing and simulation techniques can be found in many Archviz videos.
On the other side, Archviz is getting more mature and becoming a real Industry. To go from being a simple group of freelances to becoming architectural visualization professionals, you need training in business management and be aware of legal terms and issues, contractual relations and copyrights. Nowadays, it is super easy to share images, 3D assets and animation on the internet. At the same time, it is very hard to protect your work and trademarks.
ANIMA 2.5 Demo Reel
What I can say for sure is that any asset you want to create, you should create with passion. We usually start modeling things that we love: someone draws cars, people or animals, while others create architecture and buildings.
In my case, I drew human figures ever since I was a boy and, after 40 years, I'm still drawing human figures.
In the end, our job is basically a mix of hobby and business.
ANIMA 2 came to the market in June 2016 and, after several updates, has been acclaimed as the best solution for easily creating stunning 3D character animations in very little time.
Since version 2.5, ANIMA became the go-to software used to populate scenes, mainly due to the introduction of Metropoly Ready-Posed model support for still imagery. ANIMA users don’t have to worry about material conversions, texture optimization and can save time on other routine tasks. ANIMA automatically manages all of this and supports most widely used render engines available in the industry, such as: V-Ray, Corona, F-Storm, Octane, Arnold, Redshift, Thea, Mental Ray, Maxwell.
In November 2017, we released ANIMA 3, the first Archviz population tool available for Epic Unreal Engine, 3ds Max and Cinema 4D to help architects, designers and 3D professionals bring hundreds of realistic 3D characters into their scenes.
Crowds demo by AXYZ Design
Yes, ever since 2011 and with the first release of ANIMA, I was convinced that Archviz animation was the future. The key was creating simple-to-use 3D Human animation software, with which any artist, no matter how new and untrained, could in a couple of minutes generate scenes which would have taken multiple artists weeks to accomplish in the past.
Maybe it was a bit early at that time to imagine any archviz artist doing animations, but now, with real time renderers, fast processing CPUs and GPUs, animation is within anyone's reach.
The market yearns for animations and VR experiences, so it is time to calm your “anima” (Latin for soul) and prepare for the future! Since the release of ANIMA 3, and with the introduction of the plugin for Unreal Engine, producing “traditional” animation or modern immersive VR is at your fingertips.
ANIMA V3
Research is the base and starting point of every project, it's part of our daily work. Experimenting and programming for hours just to throw away tons of lines of code later is necessary and natural.
In our project we found everything on two types of research. On one side, there is a formal and scientifically based research, full of formulas, algorithms and abstractions. On the other side, there is an empiric approach, based on the study of environments, using photos, videos and artistic freedom.
Our end goal is to create visually attractive simulations, and the best thing after a long period of research is when all those ideas start taking shape, you get the first encouraging results and say to yourself: ‘Yes, this is going to work!’
All of our Metropoly collections are already available in ANIMA. We have more than 1,000 characters with infinite color variations. More quality 3D people characters are coming along this year.
Besides, it is always possible to import your own custom models and animate them with ANIMA.
TimeRide VR Breakdown
PBR is widely used in the gaming industry and has become the standard. We are also already working with PBR materials in ANIMA. It's the right way to go if you want to “standardize” 3D content creation, ensuring that models look the same with any rendering engine and in any lighting conditions.
Having said this, the main advantage of using PBR is that it limits variables when creating Archviz projects. Without a PBR workflow, we would need to go back to material edition each time we change lighting conditions, and tweak them to adapt and respond correctly to the new setup.
With PBR materials we only need to concentrate to the lighting setup. Our favorite tool for content creation is Substance Painter.
ANIMA was born as a simple population tool for Archviz. However, we have a wide variety of clients from the diverse CG industries. Something that has been great news was the use of ANIMA in Netflix’s “Cable Girls” for populating the backgrounds.
Another surprising use of our software was in the development of TimeRide VR, a 15-minute tram ride through the old town of Cologne at the beginning of the 20th century, before both World Wars.
TimeRide VR Cologne by Imagefilm
There are two amazing projects that make us feel proud of our work and products. The first one is the "Adidas -- Brazuca" Spot done for Brazil World Cup by the talented team at STOPP! The second one is the work of Luxx Studios for the VFX in the movie Independence Day: Resurgence, populating Washington Memorial park with thousands of our animated 3d people.
Independence Day: Resurgence CGI VFX Breakdown
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