Saraya - Masterplan animations - Oman

[davemcd]

Hi Everyone

Earlier this year we finished a bunch of large scale animations for a site in Muscat, Oman.

The project included a Masterplan animation, 2 x Animations for hotels on the site, an introduction Poem piece, plus several standalone interior animations which arent released yet.

All the animations were 3Dsmax, Vray 2.4, some Zbrush work. It was pretty much sitting at the limit of our farms memory to render, a large portion of that was the terrain.

I've collated 4 of the animations into this one Vimeo portfolio here:

http://vimeopro.com/lastpixel/last-pixel-saraya

Cheers,

Dave

[AlexP]

Terrain looks excellent, how was it done?

[davemcd]

Thanks Alex

It wasnt me who did it but I believe the process was to bring in DEM data to get a height terrain, we broke it into tile chunks and took it to Zbrush where it was sculpted to match reference photos we took on site. It was then optimized for polycount and normal maps output. Then it was pretty much multiple levels of texture colours, bump maps and then an onscene amount of rocks and shrubs scattered over it with Forest Pro. It was very resource heavy in the end. If we did it again we could maybe attack it slightly different and make it a bit more efficient.

The terrain was such a big selling point of the development so we had to get it pretty close to whats there.

[Macker]

Fantastic results.

How long did this take? Presumably you had various models for different levels of detail; I only ask because I saw in some shots you even had gravel and so on - surely this isn't also in the big aerial shots too?

[Morne]

Awesome stuff!
Was the architectural firm from SA by any chance?

[devin]

The scope of that project is incredible, how long did it take to render?

[AlexP]

Thanks Alex

It wasnt me who did it but I believe the process was to bring in DEM data to get a height terrain, we broke it into tile chunks and took it to Zbrush where it was sculpted to match reference photos we took on site. It was then optimized for polycount and normal maps output. Then it was pretty much multiple levels of texture colours, bump maps and then an onscene amount of rocks and shrubs scattered over it with Forest Pro. It was very resource heavy in the end. If we did it again we could maybe attack it slightly different and make it a bit more efficient.

The terrain was such a big selling point of the development so we had to get it pretty close to whats there.

Really really good looking imo

Also interested in how long this all took? How many people etc?

[davemcd]

Thanks everyone for the kind words.

Hard to give exact times as the project was slightly staggered with about 7 or 8 different animations all up (The ones you've seen plus 3 or 4 interiror animations for each housing type)

The first part was the poem and Hotel One which together took about 6 - 8 weeks I think. Then the masterplan was about 3 weeks later (though was started parralel so mybe 4 -5 weeks all up), Hotel 2 another 2 - 3 weeks an then interiors were probably about 4 weeks all up.

All in all I think we were working on it over about 4 months but with a delivery every couple of weeks.

Probably about 8 people working on it all up. probably only 4 or 5 full time at any given time.

Morne, The architect is an international firm, I believe they have offices in South Africa (assume that's where you were referring to)

Macker, It was mostly one level of detail for most things as the camera did some pretty big paths that went from wide to quite close. Some detail scenes were broken out from that and extra detail added but for the most part they shared a lot of the same Xrefs. A lot of objects were Vray proxies to get it to render. If I'm thinking of the same bit you are with the gravel that might be only in the detailed scene... take a screen grab and I'll find out.

Dave