Megalomania: City in Total Construction

Some city animations simply stand out - Megalomania is one of these stunning examples, perceiving the city in total construction. The built environment is explored as a labyrinth of architecture that is either unfinished, incomplete or broken. Megalomania is a response to the state of infrastructure and capital, evolving the appearance of progress into the sublime.

Constructed predominantly using 3d Studio Max and rendered with Vray. Organic movement sequences were originally filmed on a Canon 5D mkII, tracked in PF Track and developed in CG. Demolition created using Rayfire. All compositing done in Adobe After Effects, edited in Adobe Premiere Pro. Audio recorded and coordinated using Adobe Audition. 

More information about the project at thoughtsnotthoughts.blogspot.com/​

This is My City: AMV (Timothy Victor)

AMV in this case stands of Animated Music Video, a scene where users mashup animated shorts and link them to music.

The track in question 'This is My City' is by Timothy Victor:



We really like the track and the good news is you can download for free from Timothy's iLike page.

Massive Attack: Splitting the Atom - City in Deconstruction

Jean-Matthieu from Spot Image sent this one in - a superb video clip of Massive Attack - Splitting the atom (official video), showing and travelling into a 3D city frozen in deconstruction:



Its so good its almost hypnotic, take a look at http://www.edouardsalier.com/ for more info...

Fragmented City

The inspiring clip below was made by Tom Freitag as personal project based on an illustration he made for a book cover:


There is a lot of software coming together to make this clip, 3D Max, Real Flow, After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator with probably a few more packages thrown in for good measure.

Greetings from Seattle: Visualising the City

Greetings From Seattle from Ian Cox on Vimeo.

'Greetings From Seattle', is a film not surprisingly about Seattle. Created by Ian Cox it was made with a combination of Photoshop and After Effects.

Its really nicely done, take a look at our ever growing thread of City and Architectural Animations for more examples.

3D Max: Balls in the City

Following on from yesterday's post on particle visualization we turn our eye towards 'reactor' in 3D Max to give objects mass and thus make use of the built in Havok physics engine.

The ability to add mass, friction, elasticity, etc allows various behaviors to be simulated and therefore a possible route to simulate the city. These are early days and we wouldn't normally make such movies public, but in many ways that's what the blog is all about.

So below is our first test at using reactor - there are obvious errors but we went for a 'non realistic' bounce with lots of energy and we think it shows potential:

3D Max Balls in the City from digitalurban on Vimeo.
Music by Portoponte

It was surprisingly easy to create, we are thinking of putting together a short tutorial, if people would be interested, as we couldn't find a suitable one ourselves.

Where are we going with all this? Towards a simulated city for 'what if' scenarios, either using packages such as 3D Max/Maya/Houdini etc or more traditional Java based modelling approaches through to a return to gaming and the Crysis Engine.

More blog posts with various tips/tutorials etc to follow as we progress....

C3 Maps: Realistic City Models - Perhaps the Best 3D City so Far?

We met with the nice people at C3 last week and they kindly provided a walk through of their latest city modelling technology and its impressive:



The movie above provides a glimpse of the output which interestingly is not dependent on LiDAR. C3 capture the data using calibrated cameras that for every picture knows the positions at angles of capture at a high precision. This enables each pixel to have a known geographical position with decimeter accuracy and thus using a combination of images a 3D model can be produced.

The company has just released their Oslo model and it is well worth taking a look at.

See http://kart.sesam.no/3d/ for a 3D flythough (Windows only at the moment) and http://www.c3technologies.com for more info.

Thanks go to Frank at the Google Earth blog for the email prompt to put up a post on it :)

Life in the City: 3 Days - 3,038 Photos

3 Days - 3,038 Photos from Robbie on Vimeo.

Over the course of 3 days Robbie took over 3,000 photos of his life using a Canon 5D SLR in and around Boston. The result is a fascinating video about life in the city and an interesting insight into using the technique to represent place and space.

Music:
Lightspeed Champion - Dry Lips