CGI Original Golds Gym: Video

original-golds-gym

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

This is a 3d model of the exterior of the original golds that was done over 10 years ago. Every single one of the Golds gym shots I’ll show you in this video were done over 10 years ago. The exterior was a relatively quick up mock up to test out some 3d renderers. For this particular shot, I used the standard renderer in 3d Studio Max and it doesn’t doesn’t have the realistic look that advanced renderers have where light and color are bounced back from object to object. Today, if I wanted to I could make a very realistic tour of the original golds gym complete with equipment and train engine blueprint murals on the walls and even characters from Pumping Iron given that I can sculpt humans pretty realistically.


With this recent statue render I made in ZBrush and rendered in Blender you can see the much more realistic look a more accuracy a physically based renderer gived you. In the previous shots of Golds gym I was using a variety of lights. In this shot there are no lights. The environment around the statue, the sky, water, buildings, are basically mapped to the interior of a sphere and are bouncing light and color onto the model from every conceivable angle and that really makes the statue look like it fits in its environment. The light sources are basically the lighter areas of the environment.


This tiny image was another 10 plus year old render of Gold’s Gym’s interior except this was done using an earlier physically based renderer plug in called Vray. I’ll blow it up in a second but I only rendered it back then as a 252 by 115 pixel image because back then more realistic renderers took forever to render so I just tested out a tiny image which didn’t take nearly as long. Watch the difference right there after I enlarged the tiny image with Gigapixel which uses AI to interpolate pixels, in other words guess work in order to maintain detail as it dramatically enlarges the image. So it’s not perfect, although AI is going to get much, much better.


This was a 10 frame animation for a gif, and this, too, was rendered with a real world physics in Vray and you can see that it looks a lot more realistic than the initial animation I showed with all the red buildings. Plus this more accurately represents the exterior of Golds at the time Pumping Iron was filmed. The color scheme was red white and blue.


These clips were tiny test renders that I just enlarged within Premiere and that’s why they’re blurry.


This was an interior shot with dumbbell racks. Here is a lightened version so you can see more of the detail. This was a shot from the back of Gold’s Gym. I don’t know why I have a garage there. I don’t know if they had one there in the 70s or they just had parking within the building only later on. Maybe someone knows if they had indoor parking in the 70s or when they made it a garage if it wasn’t always there. This is an overhead shot of the gym from the back and I extended the garage even farther to the right for whatever reason. The rectangular object on the right rear roof is a mattress and I’ll get to that. A series of front shots. I could take all of this to a much higher level now having had a lot more 3D experience not to mention and much better programs, much quicker, technologies increasing exponentially and it’s only going to get ridiculously better. You cant even imagine some of the stuff that’s coming along the bend in this field with automation and AI.
Allegedly, the owner of Gold’s Gym at the time, Ken Sprague, would let poor gym members to live on the roof of the gym. Chime in if you can clarify but there was a mattress on the roof and that’s what I put on top of the gym. And if you look carefully at the top of the mattress there are 5 containers of Joe Weider’s Crash Weight Gain number 7 powder and a copy of Pumping Iron. I’ll zoom in to show more detail but this was a smaller image where I used a pixel interpolation program for enlargement which ended up guessing at some of the lettering on the protein cans.


But today you could create a much more complete realistic and accurate version of this into a interactive video game basically where you could tour the inside, complete with equipment, and even have some of the original gold’s members training there. But this was all done over ten year old ago as an exercise and only a handful of people have seen it and Youtube’s algorithms will insure that never changes.

About Yegor Khzokhlachev 823 Articles
Gorilla at Large

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