visualhouse creates teaser film to promote soon-to-be world’s tallest building

Kerrie Hughes | Commercial | Showcase | 13/01/2012 15:49pm

At 1km high, the proposed Kingdom Tower will be the world’s tallest building. Watch it being brought to life in 3D in this ninety second promotional film by visualhouse

Arch-viz studio visualhouse first got involved with Saudi Arabia’s new Kingdom Tower project after being approached by Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill – the architects behind the kilometre high design. The studio was responsible for entire production of the film, including its creativity, final CGI and compositing.

To fully achieve the 3D elements, the visualhouse team chose the power of 3ds Max for modelling and scene setup and V-Ray for rendering. Each part of the pipeline was highly organised to ensure a smooth workflow. “Any moving elements, such as people, boats etc, were rendered separately, as was the glass and water,” explains 3D artist Dan Cherry. “The frames were then composited together using After Effects. The powerful particle systems within After Effects were utilised to generate all of the non 3D moving elements, such as the start and end credits.”

As well as using particle systems, the team also opted for a new crowd simulation software. “The client requested that the public spaces, such as the promenade, look busy and full of life, so for this project, after some initial testing, we decided to invest in the new crowd generator An(i)ma by aXYZ,” says Cherry. “There is a great review of the software at Max Underground, that covers all of the main features, but for me the real bonus was the huge amount of time An(i)ma saved us adding crowds into the scene, a process that we would have previously done manually one at a time.”

The chosen software and efficient pipeline certainly eased off the pressure and put a stop to any major technical difficulties. “Kingdom Tower was a relatively straight forward project to do, and the utilising of An(i)ma was certainly pivotal in time saving,” Cherry explains. “Animating a project of this size meant that keeping track of renders, render passes, all the moving elements and individual compositions represented one of the hardest technical challenges, fortunately our strict work flow and file management systems ensured everything was kept in order.”

However, one hurdle the team had to overcome was the tower’s most famous asset – it’s height. “What made the project unique however was the inherent scale of doing an animation of the world’s tallest building,” says Cherry. visualhouse is renowned for its work on some of the world’s tallest towers and city scale masterplans. However successfully and creatively capturing a 1km-tall tower poses large complications with simply fitting the tower into a 16:9 screen; with some creative thinking from the team we managed to produce an exciting series of cinematic camera movements that embraced the tower design and nature of this iconic new landmark.”

Check out more work on the visualhouse website

Posted on Friday, January 13th, 2012 at 3:49 pm under Commercial, Showcase. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.