Brisbane
The Brisbane project brief was to create a series of images and animations to show what the view would be from the windows of a proposed seventy story apartment complex situated in downtown Brisbane. Regulations ruled out the use of helicopters so we were required to create accurate views for every fifth floor at the four points of the compass and at different times of the day.
There were also two large scale ‘hero’ animations showing views of the sunrise and sunset from the top floor and including details like moving traffic, boats, helicopters, fireworks and tropical storms. These were be projected onto a 10m x 2.5 m wall.
All of this was to be completed within 10 weeks. This was an enormous task as it involved creating detailed 3D models for the entire CBD and surrounding areas. One of the largest obstacles the project presented was the sheer amount of data that needed to be processed for rendering. This was overcome by using our in-house rendering system Katachi, which allowed us to raytrace the entire scene and integrate ambient occlusion, as well as procedurally switch individual city lights on and off at different times of day.
None of the content that we created for Brisbane was shown in standard television formats. The views from the apartments were to be called up on demand from a computer straight to a high-resolution plasma screen. The animated views of the city were projected on to a wall, using two high end projectors spooling frames off a computer disk in real time.