Q & A: Virgo Oktaviano

Featured Artist: Virgo Oktaviano

Well, well, well, we are back to normal after the holiday seasons. I hope everyone is the same. To our Chinese, Vietnamese and other nationalities who celebrate the Lunar New year; our greetings to you!"Chuc Mung Nam Moi" - "Cong Hee Fa Cai". Welcome to the year of the black dragon.

Our next Q and A is again another exciting event for this year after the initial surge of excellent MTM entries. It's exciting because our featured and guest artist  is someone who managed to establish a good reputation in the field of visualization, the multi-talented "VIRGO OKTAVIANO". Virgo is known to most of us here. This man from Indonesia had won several challenges. He is also a regular MTM contributor and tutorial writer. We at SVA would like to take this opportunity to thank Virgo for allowing us to interview him and feature his work here at Sketchup Vray Resources.

image courtesy of Virgo Oktaviano

SVR: Please tell us more about Virgo Oktaviano.

VO: My name is Virgo Oktaviano but many people know me as "igho_1209" in CG forum. I am from Indonesia. I graduated in 2007 from Gunadarma University with Bachelors Degree in Architecture. Currently, I work as designer. I am interested also with art, music and photography.

SVR: How long have you been using SketchUp and VRAY SketchUp? Please tell us your personal story how you started with both software.

VO: I have been introduced with SketchUp since 2006 by my friend Abdullah Rofii or known as "ziegrusak"- the Admin of Indosketchup. I immediately liked this software because the layout looks simple and very easy to use, even to a common people. I started to learn and use it in my professional work since 2007. Afterwards, I started also to know about VRAY SketchUp and began to learn it until now.

SVA: Any special or memorable story with your visualization experience?

VO: The first time I used VRAY for SketchUp, the result was not very good and does not satisfy me at all. Some of my friends even laugh at me, when they see my images. Since then, I took it as a challenge and intended to produce good renderings using VRAY for SketchUp. I would like to prove that VRAY for SketchUp can also produce visualizations as good as VRAY 3DS Max.

SVR: For us, you are one of the best visualizer using VRAY SketchUp as rendering engine. Any secret? What are the keys in producing excellent render?

VO: Aside from 3D visualization, I am also interested with photography. Technically, photography has taught me many things. We can learn about camera angle, composition, scale, room ambience etc. in photography. I tried to apply photography related issues within my scenes. I used them as reference tools and tried to achieve my final results in rendering to be the same quality with images taken by the camera.

SVR: How's the SketchUp community in Indonesia?

VO: In Indonesia, there are increasing number of people using SketchUp as their main software. Besides with its easyness, Google SketchUp has also an open source product. You can even use Google SketchUp Free. Therefore, not only technical people could use it - everyone can! It is a must for architecture and interior consultants to visualize their concepts and could produce good perspective drawings for their presentation. Therefore lots of people are using it nowadays. In addition, there are so many  friendly forums for SketchUp users in Indonesia.

SVR: For future development of SketchUp and VRAY SketchUp, what do you think they need to add?

VO: This question make me so excited. I think there are many improvements need to be developed  and incorporated by Google  but the support of high-polygons models is the top one.  As for VRAY SketchUp, I think one of the most important element to be included is batch rendering.

SVR: Do you have a special advise to our readers, specially the newbies?

VO: Study, study and keep learning! People can become smart through continuous learning. We can learn from anything- books, tutorials, videos etc. If you want to be expert in the area of visualization, you need to take into account its long process and it cannot be instant.  You cannot just directly produce good images by depending on other peoples' render options and settings. The "process" is the most significant issue in this area.

Another thing is experience, it is also the perfect teacher to develop yourself. Accordingly, the results that we achieve can satisfy ourselves greatly. In addition, keep joining many forums, because we can share and learn many things from other people who is more expert than us.

SVR: Thank you Virgo!

Some more of Virgo Oktaviano's render