Underneath the quiet, unassuming demeanor of Chris Schmidt dwells a creative and technical wizard.  Chris is the 3D renderer for production Plus and sits firmly in the command chair of a program called Cinema 4D, one of the premiere modeling and animation programs on the market today.  From his station in the design room he produces all of Production Plus’ computer renderings, with lightning speed and deceptive ease.  SBD talked with Chris recently about his work; here’s what he had to say.

Chris Schmidt, sitting in the seat of power.

SBD: How long have you worked for Production Plus?

CS: A couple of years.  More than two, less than three.

SBD: How did you find this job?

CS: I got a tip through cgtalk.com, an online 3D modeling and Cinema 4D forum I’m a part of.  It’s a funny story: I was working as a waiter at a country club.  A couple of the guys there and I all decided that we were going to quit at the same time and find other jobs.  I was trying to get a job at one place doing technical illustrations, but I think I scared them away with all the 3D renderings I had.  I also was going to get a job at the local bank but I waited too long on that and missed my chance.  I was a week away from being completely broke.  I was ready to go back to the country club if I needed to and I just happened to check online in the job section of the cgtalk.com forums.  There was a listing for a “Cinema 4D Operator.”  It was this job.  I applied and a week later I was here.

SBD: What had you done in Cinema 4D at that point?  What was in your portfolio?

CS: My portfolio consisted entirely of personal work and school projects at that time.

SBD: Where and how did you learn to use Cinema 4D?

I was going to Prairie State College, and I wanted to work in Photoshop and Illustrator.  I talked to the administrator there and he said that he was putting together a class of people who were interested in working in 3D–a brand new program for the school.  So I signed up.  On the first day the class gathered, the person running it said, “Everyone said they wanted a 3D animation course.  I don’t know the first thing about it.  Here is the program, here are some tutorials.  I’ll bring the donuts.”  A couple of people really took off with it, me included.  I didn’t have a car at the time, so I would get dropped off at the college at about 6 or 7 in the morning and not leave until 10 at night four days a week.  All of that time I spent delving into Cinema 4D.  There were a couple of other people getting really into it, too, and we would challenge each other to see who could do this or that.  We’d really push each other to make Cinema 4D rock.  After I finished that class, I used the program and the facility for everything I could–other classes, projects at school, my independent study work.  Shortly after all that was done I got hired to teach the very same course at Prairie State.  I’ve been adjunct faculty ever since.

SBD: What was it that got you interested in 3D graphics and animation in the first place?

CS: There were two TV shows I used to love when I was a kid: Reboot and Beast Wars.  I used to watch these shows all the time.  One day, when my buddy and I were walking through a college fair at my high school, he asked me what I wanted to go to college for.  I hadn’t really been thinking about it, but I just blurted out, “computer animation.”  And that was that.

SBD: Are there any revelatory moments in 3D graphics–for you or your students?  A point that they reach where they suddenly understand how 3D graphics are different than, say, drawing or working in Photoshop?

CS: It’s really difficult to pick out one.  When you start working with 3D graphics and animation there are about ten of those moments every day.  In any project there are a million ways to approach it and ten million ways to do it wrong.  There are many different ways to describe any aspect of working in 3D and none of them are the best way.  For example, when you get to modeling it helps to talk to people about how it’s like modeling with clay.  You can add more clay, take it away, mold it, and so on.  When you talk about lighting, there are lots of ways to approach it but it’s most helpful to really understand it for what it is: you’re creating a light source and pointing it at something else.

SBD: How do people view the things you produce?  What do you expect and what do you run into when you present a rendering?

CS: (thinks) Production Plus started to go down the path of 3D renderings a couple of years before I got here.  Before then, things were either hand drawn or done in Photoshop.  This method of rendering is clearly an abstraction and people take it as such.  They don’t take it literally.  Even drawings done in Photoshop are still abstract.  Proportions and perspective can be off … a lot more is open to interpretation.  Once you get into 3D renderings, everything is taken very literally.  The renderings are so realistic that people think they’re looking at the real thing.  Luckily, we are able to render things that can be taken literally.  Frequently the renderings effectively become the blueprint, the ground plan, to the show–to the point where that, if we’re making a stage out of eight foot sections, clients want us to show the seams in the stage where the individual platforms meet.  The renderings are taken so literally that people might question why there is a seam in real life and not in the rendering.  It’s funny; essentially the seam is an imperfection, a fact of the material.  In 3D it’s actually harder to represent that.  The imperfections in the rendering make it look real–and take a lot longer to make.  It’s easier to make a single 16 foot section of staging than it is to break up the deck into separate sections, each with their own special bevel, edges, seams, and so on.

SBD: What’s challenging you on a daily basis?

CS: Occasionally I’m asked to design things.  I’ve never thought of myself as a designer.  But whenever I have something that’s just an idea that I came up with and I see it go through the whole process and get built I say to myself, “wow.”  I’m sort of faking my way through this design process, but there it is and it looks kind of cool!

SBD: Why do you feel like you’re cast as the designer?

CS: Well, I’m in charge of visualizing the whole thing.  Lots of times people come to me with a very rough idea of what they want.  Sometimes it’s very specific but sometimes it’s very vague.  It’s up to me to interpret the client’s ideas and turn them into something to look at. 

SBD: Where do you see 3D and 4D renderings going?  Do you think that clients are going to want to see movies or motion graphics of their sets?

CS: There are a lot of directions that could go.  95% of the things we do now are stills or series of stills.  Every once in a while we’ll do an animation of a set.  Of course this takes a lot more time to render and makes revisions extremely time consuming.  It’s almost dangerous in a way, because our clients have a certain expectation about the time it takes for us to turn things around.  So if the client wants a light changed from green to blue, that’s easy to do, but to render into an animation might take overnight.  Some changes are quick but others are impossibly slow, and animations always take a long time to render.

SBD: What are the hard things to do that people wouldn’t expect are hard?

CS: Adding those imperfections to make things look more real.  Obviously none of the things in the rendering really exist, we’re faking the whole thing.  A lot of time is spent deciding in what way we’re going to fake it, and to what degree.  For example: people are very, very difficult to put into a rendering.  Before I got here, every person in every render was a 2D flat person–like a cardboard cutout set up on the stage.  It’s set in a 3D space to look real, and from the camera angle of the render the cutout is positioned so it looks right.  But it was not a 3D model.  I started putting 3D people in there.  Occasionally I’ll put in entire 3D audiences.  But specific people are impossibly hard.  We’ll model an entire set in 24 hours, and someone will call and ask for, say, 4 cheerleaders on the set.  Making a realistic human takes weeks of modeling, rigging (building the computer controls that allow the figure to move), applying textures, clothing, hair … it would take forever and people expect that it’s an easy thing and can be done quickly. So we have to fake that, track down photos of cheerleaders and slide them into place.

Chris presents Production Plus with a puzzler.

SBD: What are some other ways that you make your renderings look so good?

CS: Well, the computer wants to make everything perfect and shiny and even, and you have to sort of fight it to get things to look real.  For instance, the computer makes a cube with a perfect 90? edge, but nothing in life has that kind of an edge.  Even the sharpest edges have the smallest amount of bevel, and that bevel is going to catch light in a certain way from almost any angle.  You don’t really think about it, but those beveled edges catch light and reflect it back to you no matter where you’re positioned, and that is because of that “imperfect” edge. 

So, something I’ll do with seating, for instance, is create blocks of chairs that are not exactly in line with one another.  They’re all rotated at slightly different angles, slightly off the line–maybe one or two inches in front or in back.  Nobody in real life would be able to lay a line of chairs perfectly straight, so I randomize my chairs just a little bit so that the chairs catch highlights differently, in a more realistic manner.  You wouldn’t notice, really; but there are slight differences in the way they render that add up to a more realistic looking scene.  You feel the difference rather than see it.

Nothing is more satisfying to me than someone coming in and asking, “is that a photograph or a render?”  Usually if you look at it for a while you can identify a render, but that pause, that extra glance, is very satisfying to me.

An example of Chris' amazing set work. Look at the detail in the tables!

SBD: Anyone out there animation-wise or 3D rendering-wise that inspires you?

CS: Tons of stuff is inspiring.  I’m on the forums quite a bit and I see people who have just opened up Photoshop for the first time, and professional special effects people who have been working in movies for years.  Frequently I get over-inspired.  (grins)  If I’m ever feeling too good about myself I just go online and see how good everybody else is.  That wakes me right up.  And I’m inspired by all kinds of digital art, too.  Digital paintings, shorts, live action camera work … I end up all over the board.  Any given day I’m inspired by so many different people.

SBD: Anything you’ve done that you’re particularly proud of?  What about it are you happy about?

CS: Well, like I said, you get a nice warm fuzzy feeling when anything I’ve come up with goes out the door.  Anything that I’ve had a decent amount of input into I’m proud of.  When the client sees it, and likes it, and it was me interpreting their ideas into reality, then that is a good thing.  Sometimes what the client is asking for is rather abstract, but it has to be translated into something literal.  When those translations go well, it’s a good thing.  One that comes to mind is a set that the client wanted to look kind of like The Minority Report.  I came up with the way that would work, and I like it.  It went over really well.  When I get to wear the designer shoes and it goes over well, then that encourages me to do that kind of thing more.  And of course when something looks completely realistic then I’m really happy.

Another Chris Schmidt digital masterpiece.

Take a look at some of Chris' animation handiwork! He made our Production Plus 2007 Holiday message. Enjoy.