W Washington Hotel, part 1 - guest room

About a year ago, we were contracted to do the illustrations for W Hotel's new Washington D.C. hotel.

guest room, view 1

guest room, view 2

The new interiors were designed by Dianna Wong, and these illustrations are a collaboration with Paolo Bertolotti. I'm particularly proud of this project because we had much more time to refine them than usual, so the telltale flaws of artificiality are more difficult to spot.

guest room detail

mirror frame, test rendering

Astana enhanced, part 8 - site A

(Astana was a hurried video project where a camera flies through 1300 acres of property. Now, to answer my question, "what if we'd been given more time," I'm enhancing the entire neighborhood.)

Most of the broad strokes have been made, so it's time to give attention to the architectural close-ups.

new version, detail

Just as we modelers didn't have the time to create highly-polished renderings for this project, the architects didn't have time to complete the landscape design. I'm not a landscape architect, but I'm trying my best to fill in those gaps.
Enhancements to site A include reflective windows, flowers, and animated people.

new version

old version

Astana enhanced, part 7 - island

(Astana was a hurried video project where a camera flies through 1300 acres of property. Now, to answer my question, "what if we'd been given more time," I'm enhancing the entire neighborhood.)

new version, detail

The island is the climactic shot. I'm starting it early so I'll have plenty of time to review and fine-tune. Improvements for this area include a remodeled and remapped island surface, bridges and promenade, modeled wetland grass, boats, foot traffic (specks at this distance), and car traffic.

new version (click to enlarge)

old version

Lucette de Rugy

... and her company, Artlumiere

Astana enhanced, part 6 - sunset

(Astana was a hurried video project where a camera flies through 1300 acres of property. Now, to answer my question, "what if we'd been given more time," I'm enhancing the entire neighborhood.)

The sunset animation occurs in the last quarter of the video. The sun, sky background, diffuse skylight, reflection maps, atmosphere, lens flare, and windows, all have to be keyframed.

frame 4631, late afternoon

frame 5055, early evening

frame 5230, sunset

frame 5540, night

Astana enhanced, part 5 - refined camera animation

(Astana was a hurried video project where a camera flies through 1300 acres of property. Now, to answer my question, "what if we'd been given more time," I'm enhancing the entire neighborhood.)

Happy New Year
Keyframing requires hundreds of notes and numbers, and a dope sheet is a good place to organize them. As animation progresses, this sheet will be adjusted and re-adjusted to represent increasing polish.

version 3 dope sheet
(red row means static camera;
green row means moving camera)

This video's camera focuses on static building sites, not on animated characters. Because of this, it's important to perfect the camera animation first, so there's no off-camera or mistimed character movement.

test video of segment 20

This stage of testing is only for gauging camera smoothness, so high-quality rendering is not necessary (and too time-consuming).