Visualization of Pontcysyllte Aqueduct for the BBC Wales

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See3D recently completed work on a visualization of Pontcysyllte Aqueduct for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.

It is due to be aired on BBC Wales for their premier episode of ‘Hidden Histories’, a series documenting great engineering achievements of the Industrial Revolution.

The animation shows in great detail how the aqueduct was built, and was created, rendered, and composited with Blender.


Pontcysyllte Aqueduct Visualisation – See3D from Dan Gray on Vimeo.

Note: You can read more about the Aqueduct on the following links. The BBC site, they restricts the playing of videos (which is posted above.) on their site to a local viewing audience.

For more information on ‘Hidden Histories’ and some clips of the animation see this link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/localhistory/hidden_histories/episode_1.shtml

The full animation plus two additional supporting animations can be downloaded
here:
http://www.rcahmw.gov.uk/HI/ENG/Heritage+of+Wales/Pontcysyllte+Aqueduct+%26+Canal/

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    • radialronnie

      woah, thats really great! Those plane tree billboard really fill in the scene nicely.

    • http://www.jorgerausch.com.ar Bataraza

      Cool render… what a hard work… Congratz

    • http://www.zanqdo.com ZanQdo

      WOW thats a lot of work and great result

    • Mr.KEWL

      Nice work….For those piling up effects…is that the build modifier that has been used?

    • Born

      Hopefully I can catch this on the BBC when its aired!

    • http://www.see3d.co.uk Dan Gray

      Thanks for the comments guys!

      @Mr.KEWL – The vast majority of the animation was just keyframed, the only place the build modifier was used was in loading the bricks onto the cart. In a previous version of this animation we had used the build modifier a lot more, but decided we could ultimately get better results with keyframing.

    • TX_RX

      Yep that’s quite a nice wee visualisation alright :D

    • Jose Sanchez

      Could really use some nicer trees. Their quality doesn’t match the rest of the work and they’re the first thing one notices in the video.

    • Reaction

      Forget furry little animals, this is my type of animation!
      What renderer was used? What facilities were used and how long did it take to render at 1080?

    • http://www.see3d.co.uk/ Phil Summers

      @Reaction.

      The renderer was the blender internal and we used our in-house render farm to render the animation. If I remember correctly it took just a bit less than a day to render at 1080.

      You may have seen our presentation at this years Blender Conference, we’re opening up our render farm
      to the Blender community and are aiming to be very competitively priced (ie cheap!). We will be conducting some live beta testing of the web interface to the farm very soon, so if you’re interested in signing up for beta testing (which will get you some free rendering time) then feel free to visit http://www.blenderfabrik.com and fill in the beta-testers form.

      @Jose

      We’re working on the trees….but render time goes up quite a bit.

    • http://www.laszer.com mzungu

      Excellent work, gentlemen! I agree with Reaction: this is my kind of animation! Well done! (and I think the trees worked great! They were not the focus of what was going on and they did an excellent job of making the scene look less cg/terragen or whatever! Nice!)

    • Reaction

      That is a valuable example/promotion of Blender’s internal renderer. I expect many users (like me) would expect that for broadcast-quality stuff a super-expensive external renderer would be used. This animation should give everyone even more confidence in Blender (as if any were needed!)

    • http://www.tectrapro.com Dwayne

      Very Nice animation showing the installation and usage of the aquaduct – I like these types of training animations.