3d

Iterations of a Garage by James Whitaker

Here are a small collection of the iterative maquette models for the garage at the Anywhere House in Canada. Because the rest of the house has been split down into individual rooms the scale of a garage seems huge in comparison. The right answer ended up lying in breaking the garage bulk down, giving it the appearance of two conjoined volumes, each comparable in scale to the other volumes in the house.

Tokyo Comp by James Whitaker

I created the Tokyo Penthouse images a couple of years ago, purely as a portfolio piece blending photography and CGI together. I was looking back at them and thought it would be good share these images of the various stages of creating the image - the raw photograph from the studio, the quick render with a 3D model person as a placeholder to help set up the shot, and then the final composition. When you're after lifestyle images of a property that hasn't been built yet, this is the creme de la creme.

Emulating the landscape of Joshua Tree by James Whitaker

Over the last few months, I have been designing a house for a private client in Joshua Tree, California. As the design developed I thought that it was something that would catch a little bit of attention in the press if I showed it in its best possible light (I never imagined it would go viral). I was already using the computer to make simple 3D maquettes and with the design locked off, it was fairly straightforward to build a detailed model of the house on the computer. The context was the real challenge. The client had provided me with a topographical site plan as a PDF, which I had been sketching over. He had also provided me with photographs of the site, but the photographs weren't quite sufficient for me to use to make some nice images of the scheme - I wanted to be able to surround the building with context, in 360 degrees, so that we could get the shadows and reflections across the building. To solve the context problem I devised this rather satisfying workflow which I thought warranted sharing.

First of all I opened the pdf in Adobe Illustrator and exported it as a DWG. I then opened the drawing in Autocad and scaled it to the right size, cleaned it up, and joined fragmented contours into continuous polylines (I later realised that this could have been done automatically in 3DS Max with SiNi plugins). This drawing was then imported into 3DS Max and each contour was raised to its correct height (this was tedious and I'm unaware of any shortcuts).

With the contours set out in 3D space I then used the Terrain Compound Object to create a surface from the contours. This generates a surface that is detailed but an ugly mesh to work with - it's all triangulated.

Joshua Tree Residence Terrain Mesh

At this point, I identified some areas around the building that where cliffs and rocks, rather than sand surfaces. I duplicated the terrain surface, drew a 2D polyline around the area that I wanted to be more detailed and cropped the landscape surface down.

Joshua Tree Residence Landscape Crop

I then took the cropped down landscape surface and retopologised it using SiNi Software's Sculpt plugin. This gave me a localised area of the landscape that was turned into a neat quad poly surface.

Next, I centred the surface's pivot point to the centre of the surface and then added a point helper to the scene and aligned it to the pivot point. This is to help align the detailed surface in the right place, later in the process.

Joshua Tree Residence Anchor Point

Now I did a quick UVW Unwrap on the surface.

Joshua Tree Residence unwrap UVW

I moved the surface to 0,0,0 in model space and exported it to Mudbox. (I found that if I didn't move it to 0,0,0 first I had difficulty viewing the mesh in Mudbox.) With the UVW mapped, nicely regular mesh in Mudbox I could work detail into it easily, before taking it back into 3DS Max and using the helper to locate it in the right place.

Joshua Tree Residence Mudbox

The final step was just to adjust the original, main landscape surface so that the detailed surfaces sat over it well. I made a bunch of rocks in Mudbox and then used Forest Pack Pro to scatter these and vegetation over the landscape.

SiNi's plugin was really the kingpin in this process. If you do visualisation work and aren't familiar with SiNi I recommend that you check them out.

Creating 2D Splines in 3DS Max by James Whitaker

I've just been doing some concept design work in 3DS Max. With the design finished I needed to extract a 2D drawing that I can clean up in Autocad and then pass on to the set builders. It's a little bit of workflow that is always helpful to do with architectural projects, say when you're working on a competition, but can be a bit of a pain.

Well, I'm quite pleased with this workflow in the end. I viewed my 3D model in elevation or plan and drew splines over it using the 2.5 snap. This is pretty quick to do but can leave you with lines floating all over the place in 3D space which are then a pain to work with in Autocad. Scribe by SiNi Software has a flatten spline button, and with a click of a button your splines are all flattened to the C-Plane. Ta da!

Space Baby at 3DS Max London User Group by James Whitaker

Toddler in space

On Wednesday evening I'm presenting my work and, in particular the making of Space Baby, at the 3DS Max London Users Group. I'll be showing some of my workflow and how I created Jack's space suit with Marvellous Designer.

For more information go to - https://www.meetup.com/3DSLondon/

Come along and say hello over a pint.

If you've not been before you should, there's always interesting stuff being shown (this week being a perfect example) and beer - a winning combination!