San Francisco highrise film for 181 Fremont

Hello there fellow vray aficionados. Hope everyone is having a good weekend.

I wanted to share our latest film just released live on Friday. This was a film completed by our studio (steelbluellc.com) for a commercial client in San Francisco. The highrise is going to be mixed use commercial on bottom 2/3’rds and residential on top 1/3, as it’s currently planned.

Softwares: 3ds max, vray, syntheyes, AE, Premiere.

It was great team to work with, and we had a lot of fun putting this one together. Hope you enjoy.

C&C most welcome.

Cheers,

Mike

Wow! Just amazing job! Love the architecture, love the rendering/animation/composition!

Fantastic! Great job!

Are you able to provide timeline and number of people?

Thanks for the warm comments Crayox,Troy.

The animation was part of a larger scope that went on for a couple months, however the animation itself was about a 6 week production. Different artist were involved at different capacities throughout the production, but all in all it was about 5 people contributing towards the final piece.

Cheers,

Nice work, which program did you use for the motion tracking?

Awesome work. How did you generate the reflections on the modelled glass?

I would assume Syntheyes since he mentioned it in the OP.

Yep, Troy is correct. We started off testing some scenes in pf track, but found syntheyes was the better solution. I believe we found it handle’s lens distortion a bit better. Jon Peake is the artist responsible for the solid camera tracking.

He might be able to chime in with some more details.

About the reflections, they are real 3d geometry of the actual surrounding buildings. steelblue has a full textured 3d model of San Francisco, seen in images attached. We broke the model down into a couple versions when working on the files, as you can imagine the city model is a bit heavy. But once we sent to render, I included the whole city model.

M-


Well done! Excellent job
This is awesome
I’m not a fan of adding billboard people to animation, but the way you guys have intergrated them here in the timelapse works brilliantly!

Thanks for the comment Morne,

The timelapse people scene was done by the talented Travis Schmeising (crazy homeless guy)

I agree, he did a great job with the timing, composition, lighting, and treatment of their pace/staccato type feel with out being too overwhelming. A great balance.

Cheers,

Impressive work. It is of excellent quality.
Congratulations!!

really nice mike
nothing weird popping out, seamless looking and nice editing.

Fantastic, the time lapse shots are brilliant, I really like the stronger contrast if the later scenes, works well.
Was the time lapse shot as footage and then sped-up or was it traditional still incremental shots?
Well done.

thanks for the comments kiteman, nic, glad to hear you enjoyed it.

bob-cat, the timelapse shots were traditional still photography, then panned, scaled, and moved in post. Much of the photography was done by O’Brien Chalmers. In this particular piece, we took the jpg sequences and used GBDelflicker. However, lately we’ve been shooting all our sequences raw and use LR timelapse to remove flickering via xml data. It’s way faster, and we’ve found the results to be pleasing so far.

Cheers,

we used LR timelapse recently for a similar project- its excellent

Mike,

Thanks for posting this (and running it!) If there’s any more questions on the tracking, I can field those. This was a pretty amazing project to work on, and having a great city as a backdrop and nicely designed architecture never hurts.

Jon Peake

Fantastic work ! :shock:

Interesting work !

I’ve spotted few spots which are a bit off… Moire effect ? :slight_smile:

As to san francisco… where did you guys got that amazing model? Or is it model in house? :open_mouth:

Great work!!!

nice piece nic, I had run across that one a while back, and was admiring. The detail shots of the crown are quite nice.

Thanks for the warm comments Slizer, Dadal, Paolo. Glad you made the ‘virtual stop by’ Jon!

The model is an in house asset developed over many years. 1000’s if not 10’s of thousands of hours were put into it, making it dynamic enough to portray historical san francisco, current san francisco, and future san francisco.