Now I’d like to write about some of the problems we encountered when doing the scene instead of just writing about how happy I am that our studio got one of the awards. We (yes “we” because 2GS is always about team work and not just personal) had big problems when doing the realistic thatched roof, 3d plants (since some plants just cannot be found ready-made modelled anywhere on the internet), scattering the plants and tiled textures. Thank God one of our senior artist friends Andri Iskandar helped us with the thatched roof. He taught us how to do it and we could finally get a realistic and very fast rendering time thatched roof (not using hair and fur nor V-Ray Fur). One of my friend from Vietnam Phanh Vn helped us with the gazebo. For the 3d plants, GrowFx really helped us to create customized 3d plants in a fast way. The other plugin which helped us a lot is of course Forest Pack Pro from iToo Software for the scattering of the 3d plants in no time and this gave us a lot of flexibility. Last but not least, the simple but very powerful plugin, Vizpark’s Wall & Tiles.

Baliness design has lots of tiled textures so there is no way we could have used a big bitmap to do the randomizing and the other reason is arranging the randomizing in Photoshop is really painful to do, too many back and forth which made us loose our breath even before we started. Using Wall & Tiles, we only needed 8-10 textures and we obtained very random textures (hundreds of textures). Vizpark’s Wall & Tiles really, really helped us to save lots of time and lots of RAM.

I’d like to point out that in our studio, instead of giving up because we cannot find a pre-made model out there, we choose to learn about Grow Fx, modelling, texturing, shaders, lighting, etc. Until now we are still learning, testing, practicing. There’s 4 of us at 2GS and can’t say that all the team members have equal skills but that each of us have our own specialties. We individually always try to overcome our limits and there’s only one way to do this and it’s by practicing.

Last year, 2013, we had a very rare opportunity, we were able to meet our mentor, Pawel Podwojewski from MOTYW when he visited Bali. He always says, practice is the only way, there is no other way. Another point is that I consider myself to not have any sense of art since I graduated from Civil Engineering, my parents and brothers are business men, so I grew up in a business family. However, Evan has a very high sense of art, in junior high school, he was even able to draw a barongsai from Bali using only a pencil. He comes from an art family, his parents are very good with art, mostly his mother. So I can say I’ve learned art from Evan, he’s taught me lots of things about art and camera composition and I’ve taught him how to run a business. Since I lack the sense of art, all I can do is keep practicing day by day. In the beginning it was very painful but now it’s paid off. The other team members Bayu and Yasin, are very good with Sketchup modelling, they like to play with the models and have mastered Grow Fx in a very short time.

To submit the images for AIP 29, we learned a lot in only a week (Yes, we only had 1 week to finish the entire work) and I really mean a lot! I always believe that as long as we want to fight and work as a team, we can always surpass our limits. It’s not that we aren’t happy with the Award of Excellence we got from ASAI, we consider it a huge honor, we come from nothing and now we can get one of the highest honors that the architectural illustration profession can bestow, but what makes us happy at 2GS, especially for me, is that our hard work is what makes us now. Maybe… just maybe, this is what the Award of Excellence is all about.

The next blog entry will be the story behind the Bali Villa and what makes 2GS like now.