Hasta La Motion!

Tue 24th Feb 2015 | News

The Villa of Greta and Fritz Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, built in 1930, is a pioneering monument to modern European architecture and a designated UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site. Now the freestanding, three-story villa, which is a must-see structure for anyone interested in architectural marvels, can be viewed in real time on desktops and mobile devices via immersive visualizations created by InterMoca, in conjunction with the Museum of the City of Brno.

Over the course of two years the digital artists at InterMoca worked to reconstruct the Tugendhat virtual villa using LightWave 3D and a variety of tools, including WTools3D’s LWCAD and the Unity game engine. The goal was to create high-quality models with very small footprints for real-time applications capable of running on 1GB, 2012 smart devices.

The workflow required the team to gather proper source information on-site before modeling, texturing, and pre-lighting of objects in LightWave prior to building the interactivity within the Unity game engine where the shaders, textures, compressions, and so forth are applied.

The team also obtained additional resources and size reference information inside the villa; using a Canon 7D and GoPro to capture a large number of reference photographs and video. Photos were also used for textures but  the restrictions in the game engine required all the texturing to be simple layers and two UVs, which were exported to Unity using the LightWave FBX Exporter.

“Getting assets into Unity is simply not an issue with the strong FBX interchange tools in LightWave 2015.  No hassles, no worries, it just works,” explains Robert Greenyer of InterMoca. “The LightWave UV tools within Modeler also made it easier for the artists; this kind of work requires really well laid out UVs,” he adds.

In LightWave’s Modeler, the artists were able to achieve exact architectural measurements before moving assets to LightWave Layout.  And, since Modeler uses real-world scale units, the artists were assured that what they built would fit into the virtual environment. 

The most important LightWave features for this project, according to Greenyer, were those used to generate the HDRI color maps. LightWave’s Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR) was used extensively by the group to create photo-matching scenes, which included base textures and baked HDRI color lightmaps in GLSL shading mode to match the actual photography.

Designing for mobile platforms was challenging: The artists had to be constantly aware of polygon count, texture size, and rendering challenges of mobile devices as compared to desktop machines. In the future, InterMoca hopes to further immerse viewers with a version for the Oculus Rift or Galaxy Note 4-based headset.

The visualization is available at http://intermoca.com/store/index.php and LightWave3D

Apple has launched “Make A Film With iPad”, a commercial featuring excerpts from a speech by film director Martin Scorcese. Scorcese delivered the commencement speech to NYU Tisch School of the Arts Class of 2014. In this commercial we’re shown student film directors from Los Angeles County High School for the Arts using iPads to write, produce, shoot, score and edit their films. Directors Juliet Chin, Miu Jun and Chester Milton, along with Park Pictures film directors Chris Wilcha and AG Rojas, used the iPad Air 2 and its iSight camera with 1080p 30fps video recording. Apple’s campaign, launched during the 2015 Academy Awards, includes an iPad Film page featuring iPad apps used in the script writing, production and post production.

“You can’t do your work according to the people’s values. I’m not talking about ‘following your dream,’ either. I never like the inspirational value of that phrase. Dreaming is a way of trivializing the process, the obsession that carries you through the failure as well as the successes which could be harder to get through. If you’re dreaming, you’re sleeping. It’s important and imperative to always be awake to your feelings, your possibilities, your ambitions. But you also know this, for your work, for your passions, every day is a rededication. Painters, dancers, writers, filmmakers, it’s the same for all of you, all of us. Every step is a first step, every brush stroke is a test, every scene is a lesson, every shot is a school. So, let the learning continue.”

Final Draft Writer, camera app FiLMiC Pro and color processing app VideoGrade. Apple also featured its own GarageBand app, which was used to edit sound captured with the Apogee MiC microphone for iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Apple’s February 8 Grammy Awards commercial “Make Music with iPad”, featured the song “All or Nothing” by Elliphant (Riton iPad Remix feat. The Gaslamp Killer).

Credits

The Apple Make A Film campaign was developed at TBWAMedia Arts Lab, Los Angeles.

Filming was shot by directors Chris Wilcha and AG Rojas via Park Pictures.

Music is “Our Hearts Like Gold” by Groenland.

“Danny and The Wild Bunch,” is Rob Rugan’s captivating and award winning new short.  It’s a surreal and twisted tale about a children’s book author who is told that her new manuscript needs to be darker.  The revisions piss off the characters in her book, and they come back to make some changes of their… Read more »

Lilian Darmono, Lola Landekic, Victoria Nece and Bran Dougherty-Johnson have put together a quick (10 seconds or less) survey to get a basic sense of gender balance in motion design and related industries. Recent conversations about the motion design community have pointed to a problem: there is very little data available about key issues like… Read more »

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