Here's a 3D job that kept me busy for most of the past month. From what I gather, they're promoting a construction equipment convention that's going to be held in Las Vegas in March 2014. (Note: I DIDN'T do the video on their home page.) The images needed to be rendered big enough to output them for trade show booth displays, so the final file sizes were pretty much a bear to work with. I started with prebuilt 3D models which were purchased from Turbosquid , a 3D model site. I then used a cloth simulator in a 3D program which is a good start, but requires a lot of post rendering Photoshop work. The "cloth" is in fact a 3D plane that is dropped over the model (actually an invisible low-polygon-count "proxy" version, to get geeky for a moment) and frozen when it looks about right. Getting a proper feel to the fabric takes a good bit of fiddling with the cloth/gravity settings and trial-and-error.

Oh, and in the process, I also learned what "stanchions" are (those velvet rope barrier thingies).

Thanks to Joshua Schober for the excellent art direction.