I am a hacker and systems architect specializing in data analytics and human computer interfaces.
I'm working on a short film. It is currently untitled. Here are my production notes up until now.
Doing previsualization from nothing to something. Can't get a permit more than once so that rules out coverage on location. Started with a top down photograph of the architectural footprint from Google Earth, used the software measuring tools to determine some rough distances between points. Took the photo and brought it into Inkscape. Began tracing paths and curves around significants parts of the landscape. Got the proportions right. Imported curves into Blender, two week crash course in 3D modeling. Got the right paths converted into polygons and through a lot of guess work, some arithmetic and a lot of measuring defined one unit in a realistic scale. Read online that the building is 6 stories, guessed that one story will equal 10 feet and fudged the height of the building to 60 feet. Couldn't find any specs on the water tower so calculating height is impossible. But lo and behold, there is a treasure trove of photographic coverage on Flickr, and thanks to Flickr's camera metadata reader, I got lucky and found a dude who did helicopter shots with a Nikon D50. Both building and water tower in frame. Got the lens mesaurement and the aspect ratio of the shot. Exported data from Blender to Autodesk FBX format, solicited T for some help with that precious software. Imported FBX and T did her magic by creating the same camera and locking it to the photograph. The original geometry was composited with the photograph and the camera was moved and scaled to make the 3D building fit with the size and angle of the photograph. That gave us the water tower height reference in a perspecitive view. She created a cylinder of the proper height and exported both building and water tower as a Wavefront OBJ format file. I imported that file back into Blender and now I must match it up to the scene I have. This process was facinating. The photographic reference was what I was missing all along. It's amazing that I can use the Internet as a reference for not only visual information but also camera and lens details which can apply to a 3D world. It made me think of my first calculus class, since the number of known values was so little but it wasn't merely a 2D plane so things like angles, tangents and lens curvature influenced the results. We have come so far from those days of proving our physical world on paper to taking what was written on that paper and transforming it into a computer program so we are no longer required to do the math necessary to make the simulation correct.