Week 9

The second last week before the deadline meant we had to move fast with the short amount of time we had left to get the animation complete. The Sketchup model Camden was working on was finally complete but once she sent me the file and I opened it, the main part of the design which was the layout was not according to the satellite image and that reference is what tied us to Fenchurch street.

The walkthrough animation first test on Vectorworks-

I had to act immediately and went in re arranging every building, leaving enough spacing in between for my camera to move through for the walkthrough animation. I even went in and stylized the buildings further with more detail by adding windows and doors to allow for shadows, to fall through the openings and create a more interesting composition as it felt quite brutalist in style otherwise which held little appeal.

adding structural details and windows to the model

adding smaller windows to the taller buildings

opening the faces to create gaps for the animation to follow

Vectorworks

My initial decision guided by Claire was to import the model into Vray for Sketchup and animate it there but the software was not available on any of the systems in class and at that moment Camden had recommended to work on Vectorworks as it held a simpler interface to work with. I could have chosen to do this on Blender and potentially apply what I had previously learnt on animation using keyframes but my aim for this part of the project for projection mapping was to challenge myself out of my comfort zone to learn a new method and approach that was predominantly industry standard.

testing the lighting

That was my choice for learning Vectorworks. It was fairly simple to get used to and the main thing that I had to first accomplish was importing the model and texturing it after which I needed to light the scene and animate. It was at this stage I did need the support of the rest of my group but since she was unavailable for a long period of time I had accepted I needed to take on this task on my own and not depend on anybody to divide the workload because that was no longer reliable for the time left.

process of animation over the lighting

I spent the entire week trying to import the model, light it and texture it. This caused a few issues between the versions on the system in class and what I had on my laptop. In addition to this because the Sketchup model was scaled up and held many faces Vectorworks had issues with reading that information to place textures on the entire structure as a whole and instead led to misplaced textures with missing detail and the design lacked that uniformity.

The other hurdle was lighting it as the spot lights were either not visible or hard to navigate in the scene and didn’t look aesthetic pleasing as I wanted to create an evening scene but preferred the look of an hdri as the background instead of multiple individual light sources.