Artist Spotlight: Tronic Studio



Dec 12, 2002 -- Jesse Seppi is a Creative Director at Tronic Studio, a New York-based multi-disciplinary design firm specializing in Broadcast Design, 3D animation and the visual arts. Since 2000, Tronic Studio has brought its unique vision and creativity to a variety of artistic projects, including an interactive installation for the Diesel Denim Gallery (Soho, NY), CG content for Nikelab.com and a virtual set for the musical "Miss Saigon".

"The strength of Tronic lies in our ability to leverage our various backgrounds as architects, designers, art directors and directors to establish a collective fusing of ideas, images, movement and experience," says Seppi. "By actively shaping all projects through a rigorous conceptual process, we transcend preconceived notions of how to arrive at a particular creative solution within any of the media that we work. Because of this, we are privileged to be able to offer ourselves the flexibility to work in broadcast, film, print, internet and the environment. Our goal is to explore the overlapping condition of these fields through creativity and technology. We have a great need for realism in most or our work (broadcast, film, visualization or print) which is where Brazil comes in."

"Realistic image synthesis using Global Illumination (photon mapping) as well as HDRI lighting scenarios have become a common practice for Tronic in achieving the high quality imagery and video our clients demand. When we first tested Brazil we had been using other more expensive software setups and knew right away that this was the perfect balance of price/performance we were looking for in a high end rendering engine. We put brazil into production right away on virtual sets we did for the Broadway musical "Miss Saigon". The subtle atmospheric lighting and color bleeding as well as the motion blur on the helicopter blades we achieved on Miss Saigon inspired us to use Brazil in a 10 second spot for MTV as well as for Nikelab.com."

"Nikelab.com is a project that shows off Brazil's fast ability to deal with diffuse reflections as well as facilitate some of the custom Brazil shaders, such as velvet. For each product we modeled, lit and rendered some 64 images all within the very tight deadline of 1 to 2 weeks per product. I honestly do not believe we could have managed the quality we did without Brazil in our pipeline. On some of the shoes and watches the ability to create glossy reflections and refractions proved to be invaluable."