Interview with Olivier Campagne

Interview with Olivier Campagne

Olivier Campagne is 28 years old and graduated as "Architecte DPLG" from the Architecture School of Nantes (France). He has been involved since 2001 in Amsterdam (Netherlands), in architecture/urbanism, post-production, architectural visualization firms. Olivier is also one of the final 30 competitors in the 2005 Architectural Visualization competition.


CGA: Please introduce yourself to our readers.

OC: My name is Olivier Campagne, I am 28 years old. I studied architecture in the School of Architecture of Nantes (France). In 2001, I moved to Amsterdam (the Netherlands) to do an internship in an Architecture office, One Architecture. In 2003 I received my diploma as “architecte DPLG”. I then worked for CIIID, also in Amsterdam, doing architectural visualizations. Now, I am moving to Paris.

CGA: Tell us about your background and how you became involved in architectural visualization

OC: I remember, around the age of 11, doing tons of 2 points perspective drawings at school and in my free time. When I got my first computer, an Atari 520 Ste, I had this software called CAD 3D and was amazed when I started projecting my drawings in 3D. Also the first animation I made was by simply shooting the monitor with a camcorder frame by frame.

I studied mathematics and physics to be engineer, but then realized that I wanted to combine my passion for drawing with my scientific background. So, then I decided to study architecture. It was such a great opportunity to design, visualize and render projects.

personal work, Saint Benedict Chapel, Peter Zumthor

personal work, missile room

modeling and rendering at CIIID

CGA: As the winner of the first challenge in the AVC 2005, please tell us a bit about your image. What inspired you?

OC: I was looking for inspiration and then I recalled the Pixel Art movement and thought that maybe it would be nice to bring it about in a more 3 dimensional way. I started thinking of building a scene made out of tiny elements, the primitives. And I also wanted to add a second layer by associating each given shape to a material or texture. I was quite inspired by this new tendency in design to work with textures and patterns.

concept

CGA: Could you tell us about how you went about setting up the file and rendering the final image?

OC: I was using simple boxes to set up the lighting and the composition of the scene in order to have a fast feedback. I used a lot of arrays and the scatter command of 3d Studio Max to build each element.   

CGA: You appear to have used massive amounts of instanced geometry. Did it take long to render the file and were there any tricks you used?

OC: I think the scene contains about 3 millions polygons for 2100 primitives. It took about 10 hours to render the image. I rendered a volumetric effect as a different pass. I spent some time on Photoshop to edit the levels, saturation, color balance, and add diffuse glow.

final image

CGA: What software, hardware and techniques did you use?

OC: This scene was rendered with 3d Studio Max and Vray and edited in Photoshop on a Pentium 4, with 2 gigabytes of ram.

CGA: Of your professional and personal work, could you tell us which piece of work you are most proud of and why. Tell us a little bit about that image.

OC: I really like this image of an old church being renovated as an exhibition space. This image is part of my personal work and the starting point was the model I did 2 years ago. In this scene, I am really satisfied with the combination of colors, the composition and the light. I am getting inspiration from design which brings opposite components together, like mixing old design with new materials.

baby

CGA: How do you see the industry evolving over the next 5 years?

OC: Probably more and more connection between all media, where architectural visualization would be more transparent. The emerging creation of digital sets in movies and commercials could be a good example.     

CGA: What work do you find the most rewarding to do?

OC: I think when you work on an architectural competition. You have this great opportunity and freedom to bring in some ideas and work close to the design team.

CGA: Who has influenced your rendering style the most?

OC: I am influenced by contemporary as well as classical art and more generally all kind of images or movies productions. I think the work of Jeremy Engleman
(http://art.net/~jeremy/ ), especially his Landscape section, is really inspiring. I also like the work of the photographers Stephen Shore and Jeff Wall, and the cinematography in the movies of Stanley Kubrick and Jacques Tati.

CGA: What tips can you give to our readers to improve their renderings?

OC: Definitely have look at image production outside computer graphics such as that of great painters and photographers. Observe everything on printed, projected media.

CGA: What do you not like to see in architectural rendering?

OC: The absence of any kind of emotion

CGA: What is in the future for you?

OC: One of my ambitions would be to be involved in movie production and working on digital sets.

CGA: What are a few of your favorite links?

For Architecture content:
www.archined.nl

For great videos links:
http://videos.antville.org/

For the critical eye:
http://thebenitoreport.typepad.com/