People often assume the architectural visualisations will be stilted and “all computery” – which is of course the exact opposite of what any decent 3D artist wants to achieve.

The client was very happy with the final result!

Fairways front plots

I recently completed some exterior architectural visualisation CGIs for a local property developer – the results are nice and the client is happy – but the best thing about the project was building up the relationship; working directly with the developer and liaising with other parties has been an enjoyable experience.

Apart from circumventing layers of management I was given the opportunity to help in the design process – the developer sat next to me and we ran through different material scenarios & adjusted architectural details until he was happy.

I think that architectural visualisation can easily be leveraged by property developers at the design process as well as for advertising and planning permission; by planning the project as I did, I was able to arrange an afternoon meeting where we used real-time rendering to quickly explorer design elements.

Another great experience with this project was that I share an office with a group of talented artists and designers, and the developer was so impressed he asked for one of my colleagues to produce the marketing materials and brochures.

I’ve just completed work on some animation for the BBC 1 Christmas eve broadcast of the National Lottery Euromillions draw.

The show was broadcast live from the Natural History museum and occasionally featured animations projected onto the building itself.

The projections were based on laser scans and photographs of the building, so that when animated the building looked to be moving.

I was supervising the VFX for a couple of the sequences, notably the finale where a dinosaur smashes out the front of the Natural History Museum revealing the final Euromillion number.

I produced everything in 3DS Max and imported the animated dinosaur in from Maya via FBX – the dinosaur was animated by the ever lovely Scott Pleydell-Pearce.

My favorite part was smashing the building up using Rayfire and PhysX – I think I have a real taste for blowing things up and destroying them in 3D now – can’t wait to do it again!

You can see the entire performance here (opens in new window).

[See post to watch Flash video] ]]> http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2011/01/national-lottery-christmas-eve-draw/feed/ 0 http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/07/wind-turbine-animation-for-422-south/ http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/07/wind-turbine-animation-for-422-south/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:40:36 +0000 Justin Dowling http://www.jd3d.co.uk/?p=790

Dual Blade Wind Turbine

I have always wanted to work for 422 South so I felt honoured when they asked me to produce an animation for them.

The animation was for a dual-blade wind turbine system that would reduce the construction, transport and manufacturing cost over normal 3 blade systems.

I used 3DS Max with Mental Ray and took 5 days to complete the task.

I just finished a contract with Hi-Sim for 422 in Bristol, producing an animation for the Madrid 2018 Ryder cup bid. The job was very much like a standard architectural visualisation job except I had the chance to brush up my Maya skills and learn some new tricks from some great CG guys.

I still feel that Max has a clear lead when it comes to architectural visualisation, but found that both Maya and Max talk together so easily that it’s easy to perform a task in one then jump over to the other.

I was disappointed to find that there’s no way to save a Maya MentalRay architectural shader to 3DS Max even though the options are the same. The MetalSL language is supposed to fix the problem but only exists with 3DS max at the moment; I intend to write a script that will save materials from one application to the other.

I spent most of my time modelling and getting my head around the Maya MR proxy system.

]]> http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/05/madrid-2018-ryder-cup-bid/feed/ 0 http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/01/kenley-house-plot-c/ http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/01/kenley-house-plot-c/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:10:09 +0000 Justin Dowling http://www.jd3d.co.uk/newsite/?p=248

Kenley House Plot C

Sorento

Collection of a group of houses produced for a large housing development – these houses are typical of my work, and usually take a day or so to produce, depending on circumstances.

belgrave mews main view photomontage