Spent the last year working on an account for a new building here in Miami.
This was myself & 3 others, started feb/march of last year but we began very slowly plinking away at some assets while we worked on other things too. Work ramped up in summer.
Completed 42 images in total - quite a few of which are still not public, they happen to be mostly of the amenity spaces. I’ll post them when they go live.
We’re transitioning into the VR component of the project right now - we always suspected that VR would be a part of this so we made sure all our scenes glued together and would not be too difficult to merge as one whole. It is possible to switch on every one of the 30~ xrefs and have no double geometry!
Happy to waffle on about any part that people are curious about.
This VR is cubemap renders. We developed an app that handles navigation, audio, overlays etc. it’s slicker and easier to control than real time. this project is a bit heavy too, I don’t know how much we’d have to charge to optimise and unwrap all the assets but i do know we couldn’t get anyone to pay it…
If you have a gear vr, this is one of our public apps that use it, although it was early days and is missing some features we have now - https://www.oculus.com/experiences/go/1497597723606634/
We had a pretty strong run making sales apps of existing properties for brokers - we produced north of 50 in one year and got lucky riding the VR buzz. We had a few months where we only used vray to convert images into cubemaps! Not as much interest these days…
LOTS of post production. at DBOX we have a very post heavy workflow as what we are known for is not dry photo-real, there’s a subtle amount of faking that goes into everything we do.
We try to make images that reflect how people experience and remember spaces rather than how a camera captures them. When experiencing a space in real life, moving through a lobby to the outside, you note and remember how airy and light the lobby is, you notice how deep the blue of the sky is once outside, etc. None of those typically exist simultaneously, we experience & remember them as composites. Another example is at sunset - in real life you notice the sun hitting the environment around you, and you watch the sunset and remember it at it’s most dramatic with the sun right at the horizon - but they weren’t happening at the exact same time.
It’s very easy to go too far and make it look silly, but we try to subtly capture idealised moments and represent them all in the same image.
Basically we just do what looks good and don’t really care if it’s ‘correct’ or not.
Here’s a little gif of the living room file. Each frame represents at least 10 layers.
Thanks!
They went really smoothly - coming as part of a second phase the client was a lot more relaxed that they’d end up in the right place and focused on dressing and details - giving us a little more freedom/time to focus on making good images.
We just finished the Unit VR which went down a storm at a recent event, and we’re about to start the amenity / ground level VR work. Will be able to share a web version of that once it’s all done.
All vray - we’re still on 3.6. BF/LC - low AA & high MSR. They took around 6-8 hours each at 5k and came out pretty clean.
Haven’t bothered upgrading yet as next is very GPU focused and our scenes tend to hit 64gb by the time they’re final. We will eventually, just in no rush.
I like the mood of the images, you catch the right way to express it.
About VR version I’m quite curious to see the final result. As VR you mean a realtime interactive full 3d or some 360° images connect by some navigation points?
6x1 stereo cubemaps with navigation points.
Wouldn’t even want to consider quoting out optimising this geometry & UV’ing so it’ll work in realtime, it would be miserable. It would be months and months of work, and inevitably compromised in ways that would surprise us.
Our clients prefer the cubemap with navigation point method anyway - runs on nicer chargeable headsets, more consistent with the main images, and most importantly for them it’s reasonably priced…
