About Me

Michael began his 3D modeling and rendering endeavor in university 15 years ago where he and his colleagues designed an acid purification plant and then rendered a walkthrough animation to be presented in his group design class. The audience was impressed and thus began Michael's passion for 3D renderings. He made a career switch shortly after graduating as a Chemical Engineer to creating, designing and rendering custom modular office furniture as a result. It was about 5 years ago that he met and began working for a company starting up an online diamond jewelry retail store - www.diamondwave.com. The vision for this business was to offer a unique buying experience to the customer by presenting products online that allowed one to see intricate details of diamond jewelry. He now manages the online marketing and advertising, 3D content and technical aspects of the website.

Diamond jewelry renders are probably the most challenging to produce photorealistic results as not only do the models have to be 100% accurate for proper refraction of light in diamonds, but your environment light intensity and placement play an equally important role. Subtle changes in light placement drastically changes the refractive patterns and scintillation in diamonds. It's an art to balance the right amount of light and dark patterns in a diamond. Michael's discovery of Bunkspeed Shot Pro allows him to do this in real-time and see results in the effects of changes to light positioning instantly.

Q&A

How long have you been using Bunkspeed products?

Since November, 2011.

What did you use before Bunkspeed?

Mentalray, V-ray and Maxwell Render.

What do you most enjoy about your Bunkspeed product?

Real-time rendering of diamond jewelry... It is exceptionally fast, unbiased and makes full use of your NVIDIA graphics card cores. Render times are 10x-20x faster than traditional multi-core CPU render times.

How do you light your images?

Both HDRI maps and virtual light panels and black cards. Lit scenes are manually created then rendered as an HDRI environment map as a lighting template to speed up render times and workflow.