To lively up the tower and to demonstrate scale, liberty of movement and transportation within the Cloud City, people are essential. We have therefore been experimenting with crowd simulations in mel script in combination with animated characters and character clips.
So we are beginning to go into details with our first models and props, not to mention the actual architectural 3d model, while working on glitches with the camera movement and our crowd simulations and our character development.
One of these "detailed models", the super modern train, is part of our infrastructural development of Amman, the railway system!
Inspired by cutting edge railway technology and the German Next Generation Train in particular, we modeled a medium detail train that will be visible in our introductory shot.
After our review we started developing the look of our videos further, since it was only us who had a somewhat clear idea about it. We weren't really able to get it across with the rather rough graphics that we provided to show how our movie would work, so we went into detailed modeling, very rudimentary lighting and the materials a little earlier than planned.
Modeling of infrastructure
Infrastructure, terrain and a place holder tower
Tunnel leading into the tower's railways station
Shot from the tunnel leading into the tower's railway station
This is a brief mid-quality movie of our introductory shot (without a transition and with still a ton of glitches) that should give everyone a faint idea of the final look..
Some technical details: We are planning on going with a rather simple looking ambient-occlusion-in-white- look for the final render, because we won't really have the time to model aaaand shade everything we want to show. Plant geometry and people may turn out to look really boring with that, so depending on the looks we'll consider painting them in pastell-tones.
There is still a problem with the shader assigned to the glass and its transparency in this shot, because for some reason it shows the placeholder tower made in maya, but not the imported geometry (visible during the brief view from the side of the coach) - we haven't figured out why exactly.
At the moment the design is heading in the following direction.
We´re using a rounded loft that is sitting on top of the neighborhood structure (above). This will be a semi-transparent structure with strategic cut outs (below) with clear glas where its needed the most.
On top of the main structure we fit a repetetive pattern with a hexagonal base.
For the cut out part of the building we might use a different pattern as shown on the left.
Currently we are trying a different cut out as well as another layer to the pattern. The results of this tests will be shown shortly.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
We are currently polishing up our work and getting it into presentation format, one of which is a 5 minute movie.
Film is not necessarily the most common means of presenting architectural work and our's is even more unusual, because it is all about people in a way:
We want to have a camera follow a series of people who work and live in and interact with each other and the tower. This is a long shot - literally - because it should have smooth flow and therefore no perceivable cuts, it should look casual, should show a bustling city full of busy and hapy poeple etc. but also - almost secretly - put the building on display as some sort of a very accented background. Our camera can therefore be imagined as an invisible, very curious flying robot, an all-knowing immaterial entity.
Our movie features a series of 8 characters that seemingly coincidentially meet, pass by each other etc. and experience the everyday excitement of a real city in the ambiente designed by us.
Technical difficulties with this are, that we have to come up with smart ways of putting all the extra information in the movie that urbanists, architects and engineers are interested in, when looking at such a project. We are trying to put parts of the videos that we already have made into the scenery in postproduction (see Storyboard).
Needless to say, our focus of study lies on the social impacts of living in confined space and creating quality sourrounding, which is one reason for the video being rather simple and not necessarily photorealistic. Also we have been working alot on how this tower works and do not intend to create all the interior, which is why we will just be hinting at colors, shapes and structures inside the building.
We are currently producing the movie in maya in a few steps:
*creating architectural models from our mass models
*animating the path of the camera in the enormous environment
*assessing the coarse video in terms of movement speed, flow, timing etc.
*add architectural detail
* add people
*add sounds
* postproduce with texts, screen contents, FX, etc.
This is how far we got - the first three shots of a total of six. Coarse models and low-quality renders.
With the concept of neighborhood in our mind, we begin to wonder what will our tower look like. Tubes? Voids? Atrium? On the other hand, what will people think of the tower looking up from the bottom of it, or from the city of Amman? We are going to figure it out.
The short movie below is the experimental model No.01.
