Frassanito

Today I visited John Frassanito & Associates, a strategic visualizations company. I met with Mr Bob Sauls, one of the designers down there in the NASA area. He showed me some of the software that they use to create some really amazing video. He showed how they create storyboards, which look like preliminary design sketches to those in the field of conventional architecture. Only, clearly, they are for video versus a building. The kinds of software that they use may not be familiar to those in architecture.

These include:

Lightwave

Modo

Presenter 3D

Final Cut Pro

The last two are Macintosh-only, to the best of my knowlegde. Although, I have not researched Final Cut Pro enough to see if there is a Windows version. Suffice to say that because Apple makes Final Cut Pro, there probably isn't a Windows version.

All of these are expensive, and for Presenter 3D, hard to get.

According to Bob, Lightwave is for use on workstations, versus PCs, which are more likely to use 3D Studio Max. All of the software also is hard-ware intensive.

What to do, what to do [thinking out loud]. The School of Architecture has AutoCAD and 3DS Max on their computers, and Rhino on the computers in the computer lab, excluding the SICSA lab. I'm not sure that Lightwave, Modo, Presenter, and Final Cut are what space architects use in general. But, considering that space architects are hard to find, even in Houston, there are few data samples upon which I can make a generalization. I would like to think that knowing AutoCAD and any given 3D rendering program would get one an interesting position in a firm doing equally interesting work.

However, things aren't as simple as that.

But, back to my meeting with Bob. He showed the storyboards, the high-resolution images that are like a stage 2 storyboard (replacing sketches with computer-generated images), and how Final Cut Pro organizes clips, fade-ins/outs, and sound segments to create a single video. It was like seeing the structure of a movie exposed, like stripping the sheetrock from a wall, or cutting a house in half. I could see the structure within the movie.

All of this has made me more interested in animation and video-production than before. I should really take what I currently have, 3DS Max, and see how far I can get with it, before moving onto more expensive programs.