Interview with Chris Blewitt of Luminova

Interview with Chris Blewitt of Luminova

Chris Blewitt, one of the founding members of Luminova, has over 25 years of lighting design and management experience and is responsible for developing and applying computer application technologies. Chris is responsible for the global operational focus of Luminova and heads up the London office.


CGA: Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Luminova
and your role there?

CB: My name is Chris Blewitt and along with Paul Arden, I am a partner in
Luminova. Our company currently comprises 20 people, where we have 10 full
time 3D modeler/renderers, 4 full time programmers and the rest are made up
of production management, administration and marketing personnel. Luminova
specializes in producing very large scale “physical based” 3D computer
generated images, animation and virtual reality files using “Global
Illumination” rendering techniques. In addition to our people, we have a
dedicated rendering system with over 100 processing nodes (most are dual
1GHz processors with 1GB of RAM) creating almost continuous visual output of
our projects 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Luminova has completed over 450 projects in a wide variety of countries,
including: Australia, United Kingdom, USA, Europe, Singapore, Malaysia,
South America, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Our clients include General
Electric , House of Fraser, Ford Motor Company, Perkins Engines, Dyson Appliances, Dulux Paints , Geest Foods, Tesco, Imperial Tobacco, Lend Lease, Westfields, Coles-Myer Department Stores, Wing Tai and USI developments. My role is principally in marketing and overall administration, I am currently based in the UK setting up our new company here.

CGA: Tell us about your background. How did you get into the Architectural
CG industry?

CB: My background is in lighting design and application engineering, going back
some 25 years. With the arrival of personal computers some 18 years ago and
the frustration of trying to manage the endless need for vast amounts of
“point by point” illuminance calculations, I had the very good fortune of
meeting Paul’s grandfather, Bill Arden. With Bill’s considerable dedication
and resourcefulness, we were able to put together a very sophisticated and
high speed CAD based lighting program called Autolume, which I believe is
still the principle lighting design program of General Electric Lighting
Systems of Hendersonville, North Carolina. Over many years we became
involved in numerous large lighting projects, which Autolume was used for,
and we developed quite a reputation for our capabilities. Through that time,
I met Paul who clearly had a passion for the CG side of our work and
ultimately persuaded Bill and myself to pursue the possibilities of Global
Illumination systems such as Radiance™ and a new package called Lightscape™
which was only available on SGI’s then.

CGA: When was Luminova started?

CB: When Bill, Paul and myself decided that we wanted to be the first company in
the world to become dedicated to physical based graphical/image output where
lighting system performance could be combined with full 3D architectural
detail, we loosely formed a company called REA which many people believed
stood for “Reality Engineering Australia” when actually it was the initials
of Bills’s wife “Robin Elizabeth Arden” who had very recently and tragically
died of cancer. After some 9 months we accepted an offer from an engineering
services company to form a combined business called “Luminosity”, however
after 2 years of considerable technical and commercial difficulties, we
separated from the engineering company and immediately formed Luminova,
which has now been operating very successfully for nearly 3 years

CGA: What is the primary focus of Luminova’s services?

CB: Luminova specializes in high quality, high speed and very cost effective
computer modeling and physical based visualization services. Our system
allows us to rapidly create very efficient modeling of large scale and
detailed scenes and/or libraries of objects. This also allows us to very
quickly edit these scenes to provide rapid and comprehensive feedback on
development detail, virtually as it occurs in real-time. And we do this with
very little reliance on CAD detail, using instead sketch or photographic
information and an “iterative and somewhat interactive” web based review
system. Most significantly, our upfront fee structure almost always
includes unlimited editing of the scene detail / options and unlimited
output, be it in the form of images, animations and panoramic files.

CGA: With over 25 years experience with lighting design you have undoubtedly seen many changes in your industry, how have developments in the CG industry allowed you to better serve your clients needs?

CB: Strangely enough, prior to our CG phase, the engineers and specialist
lighting consultants eagerly analyzed all of our numeric and isolux output.
However, since we have been producing CG output, we rarely have any
discussions with these same technical experts, rather our output is
delivered directly to the project management or architectural team. So the
answer to this question is that our primary client has now changed and I
believe that this new technology has allowed a far greater level of
communication and understanding of the design detail that simply was not
possible previously.

CGA: Where do you see the future of architectural rendering and how will new
rendering technologies affect the future of Luminova?

CB: Definitely the future lies in low cost, globally illuminated, real time
virtual reality of not just architectural environments, but of all
environments. With Paul’s considerable work in this area, we have some very
exciting developments occurring at Luminova that will bring us closer and
closer to this reality.

CGA: What have been your biggest challenges both past and present, with
regards to computer renderings and lighting design?

CB: Without doubt, the biggest challenge and our greatest achievement has been
the development of a team-based approach to rapid creation of large-scale,
corruption free, low polygon count models suitable for Global Illumination
rendering. We found that existing modeling techniques were far too slow or
restrictive and required enormous amounts of time in the refinement process,
which almost killed us financially. In the end, we realized that we had to
train ALL of our personnel from the start and, as such, we have never yet
employed a modeler with any previous experience.

CGA: What project are you most proud of and Why?

CB: The most significant project for me has to be the Old Royal Naval College at
Greenwich in London. When I first came to London, we were presented with the
opportunity of doing this most prestigious and high profile project. When we
were awarded the work our client received much criticism about giving such
an important project to an unknown company from Melbourne, Australia. When
we delivered the first detailed images of the college within the first 5
days and showing an amazing level of detail considering we only had
photographs to work from, all criticism suddenly and completely disappeared
and our credentials have never since been questioned. Shortly after that we
were asked to provide physical based output for the London Coliseum (or
English Opera House), which we were told, established a completely new level
in both modeling and rendering detail. (See top of right column for images)

CGA: What is in the future for Luminova?

CB: Our future definitely lies in continuing to expand our modeling and
rendering resources, but also to allow Paul and his team to continue our
program of relevant visualization and VR technology testing and development.
Due to our considerable application profile and experience, we have quite a
number of valued development partnerships and associations with some of the
largest companies in the CG industry, providing us with the opportunity to
either further develop or perhaps influence how these technologies may be
implemented

CGA: What do you not like to see in computer generated architectural work?

CB: Clients who claim that there will not be any changes in the detail they are
providing, firstly because it is never true, but much more importantly they
risk squandering their best and cheapest opportunity to quickly explore
options, communicate ideas and generally refine the overall development
detail.

CGA: What tip(s) can you give our readers to improve their architectural
renderings?

CB: When you get frustrated with the image quality being less than you hoped
for, don’t blame the rendering system first, make sure you have modeled the
scene geometry correctly. Inefficient or poor modeling nearly always causes
poor image quality or very long processing times.

CGA: What is your favorite link to visit on the web? (not necessarily CG
related)

www.avsim.com
www.flightsim.com

CGA: Which/What web based resources that you have found the most
informative?

CB: There are quite a number of web sites that we monitor and use, my favorites
though, would be the Lightscape™ discussion forum and more recently
www.illumenal.com. However, because I am not involved in the
day-to-day production issues at Luminova, my interest lies in following
trends and new tools for CG, rather than using the resources that may be
available.