Designviz From planning the London 2012 Olympics site to the regeneration of a Tyneside toffee factory. by Stephen Holmes
Stratford Masterplan The term ‘legacy’ was bandied around the London Olympic Games well before any athlete took to the track. In order to avoid an isolated, unoccupied, publicly-funded white elephant, plans were put in place to make the site saleable even before the starter’s gun went off. As a visualisation partner, London-based Glowfrog provided CGIs for the athletes’ village, from early site-wide concept design to individual plot planning submissions and marketing. For over five years the team of 15 CGI illustrators and retouch artists worked on visualising drawings from 15 different architects. The results show the 700-acre site in various stages, including post-games design. Glowfrog met with the clients’ project management team, each separate architect and their design team to discuss their working practice, software used and setting in place data procedures for an efficient flow of information between all parties. “We shared 3D models with an animation partner on the project, Hatton Associates, who work in Autodesk Maya,” says Glowfrog managing director Nigel Hunt. “Between us we perfected a pipeline to share 3D assets and reduce the cost to the client by maintaining a single up-to-date global 3D model of the entire site that could be used for producing detailed CGI renderings and regular animation flythroughs of the project.” Working with all the different architects meant the team needed to adapt to each building plot separately. “Some architects provided 3D models from SketchUp, others Rhino, Revit, MicroStation, Vectorworks, AutoCAD 2D drawings; basically everything and, for a period of time, all at once,” explains Mr Hunt. The team first prepared the data, drawings and 3D models received from clients during pre-production. Moving into the production stage, buildings were modelled, materials and lighting were applied and the image was rendered in passes. The team primarily used 3ds Max and Vray, working on Boxx workstations, with its own in-house render farm. In post-production the image passes were composited together by retouch artists using Photoshop, adding additional details such as people, sunny skies and trees. ■ glowfrog.com 30
March / April 2013
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