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Description

Bernard E. Sleight (pronounced "slate") landed the role of Carleton Robberts, a character with what appeared to be a very minor role at first, but which wound up being very important.

BERNARD: Everyone seemed so surprised that I took a smaller role after doing so well with "Hush" , but what they have to remember is that those movies filmed back-to-back. I got the part in "Angel" because they'd seen a pre-release copy of "Hush," which hadn't come out yet. Nobody knew that it would wind up doing pretty well at that point, including me, and you take the work as it comes, you know? Plus, "Angel" let me do something besides being a scary dude. Black guys -- especially black guys who look like me -- don't often get the chance to play the socially awkward but appealing computer geek with the big squishy brain, so I was going to take any chance to show my range and play something different that I could get.

* * * * *

First of the character posters, going from the lowest billed important character to the top. Featuring Bernard for Silas 8, the shirt from Just Josh, and the backdrop is a render of Truform's Tech Office from Rendo.

Tech Office is kind of weirdly impressive. As with all of Truform's stuff, it loads as one big chunk, but with dozens of parts so it can easily be taken apart. It's designed for Poser, but easily converts to Studio .... 3Delight Studio, that is. Converting it to Iray was ... work. It has more ambient surfaces than I have ever seen in a single set before, and they all needed to be converted to mesh emissive surfaces. (Tech Office does have subsets for quicker loading, which is a relatively recent change by them. Unfortunately for me, it wound up being more sensible to load the whole set and change all the surfaces at once, then chunk it out as needed myself.) Because the set can be taken apart in the way that it can, while it has repeating textures for its surfaces -- and a surprising number of surfaces with no texture at all, which was nice -- it doesn't have repeating items with those surfaces. So every single one of those monitor surfaces needed to be handled individually because they were all separate objects, even when the texture repeated. There were something like 20 small monitors, ten larger moniitors, a hologram that needed to have a transmap made, a backlit keyboard that needed a transmap made, two ... things that I have no idea what they are but they look really cool. (You can see one of them glowing quietly under the words "The Nerd", above.) Weirdly, there was one thing I absolutely could not find for love or money, an item with a surface called just "Dome Light". Simple enough, you'd think; I just converted it to emissive and looked to see where the light was coming from. It was early enough in the process that there wasn't much interference from other lights, but I couldn't find it. OK, I think, "Let's turn the luminance up to 15,000,000 cd/cm2 -- that will white out the set, but I'll get a sense of where the light comes from." And ... it did not white out the set. As far as I can tell, it did nothing at all. Still couldn't find it. So I turned it back down to 1500 cd/cm2 and ignored it.

Description

Bernard E. Sleight (pronounced "slate") landed the role of Carleton Robberts, a character with what appeared to be a very minor role at first, but which wound up being very important.

BERNARD: Everyone seemed so surprised that I took a smaller role after doing so well with "Hush" , but what they have to remember is that those movies filmed back-to-back. I got the part in "Angel" because they'd seen a pre-release copy of "Hush," which hadn't come out yet. Nobody knew that it would wind up doing pretty well at that point, including me, and you take the work as it comes, you know? Plus, "Angel" let me do something besides being a scary dude. Black guys -- especially black guys who look like me -- don't often get the chance to play the socially awkward but appealing computer geek with the big squishy brain, so I was going to take any chance to show my range and play something different that I could get.

* * * * *

First of the character posters, going from the lowest billed important character to the top. Featuring Bernard for Silas 8, the shirt from Just Josh, and the backdrop is a render of Truform's Tech Office from Rendo.

Tech Office is kind of weirdly impressive. As with all of Truform's stuff, it loads as one big chunk, but with dozens of parts so it can easily be taken apart. It's designed for Poser, but easily converts to Studio .... 3Delight Studio, that is. Converting it to Iray was ... work. It has more ambient surfaces than I have ever seen in a single set before, and they all needed to be converted to mesh emissive surfaces. (Tech Office does have subsets for quicker loading, which is a relatively recent change by them. Unfortunately for me, it wound up being more sensible to load the whole set and change all the surfaces at once, then chunk it out as needed myself.) Because the set can be taken apart in the way that it can, while it has repeating textures for its surfaces -- and a surprising number of surfaces with no texture at all, which was nice -- it doesn't have repeating items with those surfaces. So every single one of those monitor surfaces needed to be handled individually because they were all separate objects, even when the texture repeated. There were something like 20 small monitors, ten larger moniitors, a hologram that needed to have a transmap made, a backlit keyboard that needed a transmap made, two ... things that I have no idea what they are but they look really cool. (You can see one of them glowing quietly under the words "The Nerd", above.) Weirdly, there was one thing I absolutely could not find for love or money, an item with a surface called just "Dome Light". Simple enough, you'd think; I just converted it to emissive and looked to see where the light was coming from. It was early enough in the process that there wasn't much interference from other lights, but I couldn't find it. OK, I think, "Let's turn the luminance up to 15,000,000 cd/cm2 -- that will white out the set, but I'll get a sense of where the light comes from." And ... it did not white out the set. As far as I can tell, it did nothing at all. Still couldn't find it. So I turned it back down to 1500 cd/cm2 and ignored it.