ZACK DIXON

The immersive entertainment company Nightscape was contracted by the urban development joint venture Ensemble / Mosaic to build a 3D interactive visualization of their 1,200 acre city re-development project.

I lead a team of five artists and two developers to build and deliver the first section of the development area, called The Waterfront. It features six buildings; residential, hospitality, and industrial developments. And a revamped city infrastructure that incorporated modern environmental engineering and public transport.

Base CAD models for the buildings were supplied by the client, but the layout for the environment was reverse-engineered by myself using satellite data. Foliage and custom exterior furniture was modeled based on concept renderings by our artists based on my direction.

The CG pipeline was developed based on previous ArchVis projects that myself and technical producer Kevin Longwell jointly designed. CAD vectors were converted into quadrilateral geometry by automatic and manual methods, then loaded into one of three different 3D modeling platforms depending on the artist each building was assigned.
From here, the most tedious phase was done. Geometry produced by automatic vector conversion is not always suitable for rendering right out of the box, and especially not in realtime. Massive groups of objects were combined, simplified, or outright eliminated. Retopology was needed in areas where the conversion algorithm struggled, and UV mapping was done to reproduce accurate textures in areas that required it.

Clean geometry was then loaded into Unreal Engine, where lighting, materials, and environmental world building was completed according to whatever references we received from the architects.

Towards the end of this project, a company-wide reorganization was done and the original project IP was transferred to myself and fellow business partner Kevin Longwell. Together we assumed the roles of the artists and developers that I had previously directed. We completed the remaining materials, environmental editing and interactive programming ourselves. The second phase of this project under the new organization continues under the CG Generalist category as Navy Yards: Phase II.