This large model and film were produced for the client's website for the promotion of the sale of the luxury apartments within. This extended cut version has scenes not on the website intro page to reveal the whole of the production of the exterior; ie. scene lengths and the additional street view of the neighborhood.
Résidence Michelange
Video: Résidence Michelange Exterior and Environment
Video: Résidence Michelange Apartment
This video reveals the tour of the interior of one of the luxury apartments in Résidence Michelange. Though the contract was for a 30 second film, this extended edit reveals the whole of the production for the interior.
Website
We were asked to develop a website that would showcase the imagery representative of the final building and promote the sale of the apartments within.
In less than a year, every one of the apartments had been sold though the building was still under construction.
3D Images, programming, graphics and video content were the results of one year of modeling and collaboration with the architects. The decision to keep the site up even after its goal had been met, extended its online life for an additional year.
www.residence-michelange.ch
Construction site panel "panneau du chantier"
Mandate: 3D construction of building, its environment for video
1. Video 3D: Tour of exterior of Residence
2. Video 3D: Tour of interior of apartment within the Residence
3. Graphic design: Creation of the Residence Michelange's logo
4. Web design: Build and create the Ipad compatible Website
5. Print design: PDF documentation for promotion
6. Print 3D: Create high definition images for construction panel
2. Video 3D: Tour of interior of apartment within the Residence
3. Graphic design: Creation of the Residence Michelange's logo
4. Web design: Build and create the Ipad compatible Website
5. Print design: PDF documentation for promotion
6. Print 3D: Create high definition images for construction panel
Client: INDUNI
Masonry company, reinforced concrete and civil engineering
Christian DANZ :
President of the Associate Board of Directors
Job Validator: Peter Pfirter
Architect : RS Création SA
Masonry company, reinforced concrete and civil engineering
Christian DANZ :
President of the Associate Board of Directors
Job Validator: Peter Pfirter
Architect : RS Création SA
Meeting & Overcoming Challenges
Exterior vs Interior lighting
KP's CGI department (infographie) set itself to deliver a film that needed to resolve a milestone in 3D lighting.
Resources said, "It can't be done."
Interior lighting vs. exterior lighting: When looking at exterior models in animation, you will notice that IF interiors are revealed, they are normally masked in shadow. When observing animations of interior models, the views through the windows are normally overexposed and contrast details are lost.
This is because the ambient light source of the exterior's "Sun" is so much brighter than the intensity of the interior artificial lighting.
Ex. ie. a bedroom lamp in a closed box can be set very bright allowing the photon dispersion to reflect and bounce off the walls, lighting the entire space. But, put that same lamp out in a yard and you will only see the lamp geometry. Its light is extinguished by the source light's sun.
However, our apartment video needed to overcome this overexposure for two primary shots.
1. Camera from a darkened hallway into a sunlit bedroom looking through the window onto the view of the north side of Lake Leman (Lake Geneva) and returning in elevation to a corner focusing on the height of the ceiling in the space.
2. Video starting from within the apartment and ending with a
Resources said, "It can't be done."
Interior lighting vs. exterior lighting: When looking at exterior models in animation, you will notice that IF interiors are revealed, they are normally masked in shadow. When observing animations of interior models, the views through the windows are normally overexposed and contrast details are lost.
This is because the ambient light source of the exterior's "Sun" is so much brighter than the intensity of the interior artificial lighting.
Ex. ie. a bedroom lamp in a closed box can be set very bright allowing the photon dispersion to reflect and bounce off the walls, lighting the entire space. But, put that same lamp out in a yard and you will only see the lamp geometry. Its light is extinguished by the source light's sun.
However, our apartment video needed to overcome this overexposure for two primary shots.
1. Camera from a darkened hallway into a sunlit bedroom looking through the window onto the view of the north side of Lake Leman (Lake Geneva) and returning in elevation to a corner focusing on the height of the ceiling in the space.
2. Video starting from within the apartment and ending with a
camera move that left the salon/living room through the south balcony sliding glass door, continued down through the terrace elevations into the street, through the village towards the French Alps' Mont Blanc.
The lighting software company's specialists and modelers who troubleshoot lighting issues told us that this challenge would be overcome by producing three separate animations and using post production techniques to blend them together.
However, this suggestion only created more problems with the transparency rendering of windows. To accomplish what they suggested, the whole production would have to be done without transparent glass in the windows losing all natural reflections in the final product.
This was an unacceptable sacrifice to us. So, Kemp Productions resolved to discover how to have what we imagined by ourselves.
As you can see in this video, we have a seamless transition between the interior and exterior lighting without any post processing. The computer imagery is produced by the working 3D model alone in a single pass render.
Though the model was expansive, heavy with the light placement and therefore taking enormous rendering time, we are very pleased to present our successful results.
The lighting software company's specialists and modelers who troubleshoot lighting issues told us that this challenge would be overcome by producing three separate animations and using post production techniques to blend them together.
However, this suggestion only created more problems with the transparency rendering of windows. To accomplish what they suggested, the whole production would have to be done without transparent glass in the windows losing all natural reflections in the final product.
This was an unacceptable sacrifice to us. So, Kemp Productions resolved to discover how to have what we imagined by ourselves.
As you can see in this video, we have a seamless transition between the interior and exterior lighting without any post processing. The computer imagery is produced by the working 3D model alone in a single pass render.
Though the model was expansive, heavy with the light placement and therefore taking enormous rendering time, we are very pleased to present our successful results.
Diamond Walls
A serious hiccup arrived when trying to light the interior of the apartment after the exterior model was complete.
Series of renders continue to exude bizarre "Disco Diamond" walls. In and of itself... a very cool effect if expressly desired. But, in this case... production stopped for another delay without explanation.
Again, we spoke to the software company's specialist and the answer was, "Cool effect, but we have no idea how you are getting it or why."
After several weeks (again diminishing the production time for the fixed deadline) the reason for the problems was discovered. The continued efforts of the lighting software developers working the issue determined a limitation to the 3D modeling program.
They said several times that they'd never seen a model so big in face-count... ever... let alone while testing the limits of their lighting software. But, what they discovered was that my model was too big even for the modeling software to build with.
Because of the expansive physical distance in the terrain of the model from the Residence to the mountains, both the 3D soft and lighting soft were choking on trying to disperse the light in the apartment in a reference of distance too large to calculate. The results were these "Disco Diamond" walls and the crashing of the 3D software on both Macs and PCs.
We then had to rebuild the terrain to keep its perspective for the animation but utilizing much less geometry in the model itself. With this reduction in the overall scale of geometric distance, the software was then able to handle the computations.
@ 2012 Kemp Productions & CO