Mecanoo architects won the competition for the National Kaohsiung Performing Arts Center, Taiwan. And Blender helped them do it.
Sander Boer says:
Blender is officially Up And Coming, you know this is happening when architects are winning competitions using it.
We just got news this morning that our office, Mecanoo architects, has won an architectural competition for a prestigious complex that houses no less than four theaters.
The center itself sounds like it will be amazing. Mecanoo's website says that at 100,000 m2 the National Performing Arts Centre is to become the largest theatre complex in Taiwan. The theatre complex will be located in the Wei-Wu-Ying Metropolitan Park and features a concert hall, an opera house, a theatre, a black box with a total of 5,800 seats and an open-air theatre suitable for thousands of visitors.
While Blender wasn't used to render. It was used to model small parts of the designs and for cleaning up. Rhino was used for most of the modeling and VRay rendered, with heavy post in Photoshop. The animations were actually rendered using Respower. The Blender sequencer was also used for sequencing the clips together. Some techniques were borrowed from Viralata's tutorial set on toon and sketch style renderings. A technique that Sander Boer states he learned from reading about it on Blendernation.
If you'd like to view the presentation that Mecanoo created all the clips are viewable at youtube.
13 Comments
That's really cool.
I think that the rendering style could be achivied totally in Blender.
Wow.. that is great. The youtube clips are awesome and the design is A1.
Really great!!
Really impressing work! And it shows - like some other entries here - that blender is not "only" for character animation, fantasy and all that stuff - it has become a very functional tool for technical and architetectural visualization too. And it will become even much better with the coming parametric modeling features.
Very good! And when I look at the final videos, I also have the impression that it would be possible to achive about the same result only using blender... So, who knows, maybe next time we hear about Mecanoo, they will have switched all office to blender? Being a dutch office, it would be fair! I mean, actually, it would be nothing more than their duty! :)
PS... I also do architecture competitions with blender... Including all the conception work. But, well, I didn't win anything until now :)
Simple and Great. Like every design should be.
Whoa this is really nice. I just hope that blender had nurbs so that blender would be use widely by architects
really looks great!
Dunno, how the other vids where, but it really looks like a winner :D
I especially like the cut through. :D
Waouh, I'm such a star. I hope my name will be written in big on the building with a sentence such "without this great man, nothing would have been possible !" Thanks a lot anyway, I'm so happy to make my small contribution (hopefully the design of my house model was not borrowed...)
Seriously, the work is very nice, both design and animations. I like it. Simple and effective.
In hindsight I agree that the stills shown in the vidoes can be rendered using Blender.
I've come to the conclusion that the control that we need is not in the renderer but in a good layered setup (specular, color, shadow, AO, etc), transporting the control over the image to photoshop.
I've dabbled with this concept for another project using Indigo, blender's AO and objectID passes, works great ! (i.e.: fast&flexible)
Kudos to Viralata, I used his setup, altered a little bit, timewise a real lifesaver.
NPR is high on my wishlist, in the viralata way it was fast and forgiving to the model (doubled faces and whatnot), I hope the freestyle integration is making progress, together with AO and shadows it would make a great presentation tool for architectural studies.
Kudos to ResPower, really, really cool. 1500 frames SVGA under two hours rendered, downloaded and sequenced.
Kudos to YOU Bart, for this great site, I check it every day, great place for news and techniques.
And let us not forget,
Kudos to YOU, Blender Community and all its Developers, without you this great program would not exist !
Thanks for the info Sander. Great job you guys did.
I love it! It really does look cool! I can see why it won!
-epat.
Ey Sndr,
nice job, well done. maybe you could come over here and help me out here in the carribean to create those great visuals!!
Hopi Bon Swa,
Cee