River Terrace Inn, Napa, CA

With basic autocad drawings and reference material for the interiors and finishes from the interior designer, I created a sample guest room and the lobby. This was my first application of Radiosity for interiors. I eventually abandoned it for lighting the lobby public space but managed to get it to work OK for the guest room interior, by realism standards for the day. I was not asked to create an animation but I did crank out a little 320x240 walkthrough of the lobby. A year later, as I was getting into realtime, I used the guest room, with its Radiosity baked interior lighting, as a test for an interactive interior space. I have included a download link for that .exe scene below. Download the .zip, extract the single .exe and double-click to play the scene. I warrant this file free from any malware or virus. It's just a simple interactive scene from 2005.

Several years later I was in Napa and made a point of dropping by the finished hotel. I took some pictures to compare with the vision I had created for the spaces years earlier, long before construction had even started. I'm quite proud of just how close my vision was to the actual finished hotel.

These moments of seeing real-world places come to life after envisioning them in my head are among the most satisfying experiences I have as a 3D artist. I suspect the same is true for most of the architects, engineers and designers I have worked with.

Out of courtesy, below is a link to the hotel's web site. I have not stayed there.

This is a self-extracing executable. I warrant this file free from any malware or virus. It's just a simple interactive scene. Depending on your computer, you may be required to download an additional file or two to run it simply because the scene is so old. This is for Windows and likely will not play on a Mac. 

Real-time for these kinds of visualizations was in it's infancy at that time with several companies competing to find a solution given the limited graphics power of the day. I was using an old, esoteric program called Blitz3D which required some significant coding in BASIC but could produce results similar to games of the day, provided your scene was not too complex. Many clients during that decade needed solutions like this but they were also afraid of the technology and indeed it had its limitations. Of course starting in 2014 we got public access to Unreal Engine 4.0 and that changed everything going forward for real-time visualizations.