Get That Animation into VR: A Case Study of Capitol Tower

RAMY HANNA: This may be the second presentation I've done where technology is working. There's always something that breaks. I know! I may have to borrow your laptop, right? All right, they're closing the doors. I guess that means-- Come on in. There's a couple seats up front. There's some up here. Might hurt your neck but-- All right, we'll go ahead and get started. My name is Ramy and I'm with TILTPIXEL, and this is the Get That Animation into VR-- and we're going to do A Case Study on Capitol Tower. So if that's not the class that you're supposed to be here for, then you're in the wrong class.

So a little bit about me. I work for TILTPIXEL and before that I worked for an architecture firm for eight years doing renderings and animations. And so right now, we do mostly-- that's kind of our bread and butter-- renderings, animations for architects and developers. A little bit about the course. We're going to discover VR, so learn what the different uses and the applications are. Learn how to use it in your design or your presentation. And also understand, I'm going to go through a little bit of the process of creating an immersive 360 tour that we did for Capital Tower.

So this is our little office, and we're a small studio based out of Houston. We have eight in our office and so we're a small studio-- but we have quite a bit of work. This is one of our green screen spaces that we use to do green screens in a pinch-- and we use it in our renderings, we use in our animations. This is also the fun area-- the fun zone-- and these are some of the toys that we have, and we have a drone. I'm going to highlight on some of these a little bit later, but a couple 360 cameras and a GoPro-- and obviously an SLR, which is always useful to have. In addition to those, we also have some headsets-- and these are the ones that we primarily use. These are ones that we have that we really like, and the ones that we use for the most part.

And most of our work-- this is a little bit of most of the work that we do. This is still rendering of a corporate space, but a broker came to us and said, can you flesh this space out? Sometimes the architects, they'll have an interior designer and they'll say, we want this chair in this fabric, in this light fixture. In this case, they didn't know what they wanted, but they knew they had to turn around something really quick. And so they're like, just come up with something, so this is one. And then, those tend to be probably our favorite projects. This again is our project. They designed the building, and we got to do the rendering on it.

We also do residential, so this is a residential rendering of this. This is in Austin. This is the tallest-- currently the tallest tower-- because there will be one that will be taller-- but right now, it's the tallest. This is the penthouse in the Austonian. The brokers obviously trying to sell the space to a prospective tenant. And right now, if you were there and they took some pictures, it's just concrete and it's gutted. So it's much easier and cheaper to do this on the computer than it is to stage it in real life. Some corporate renderings and this is another residential rendering that we did. Then we do some other interesting work.

This is the Harbin Opera House designed by MAD Architects. And here's another interior. We also do some retail, and so we work with a lot of brokers to try to turn around a lot of different retail spaces. So we'll do one pitch for LEGO and then if it doesn't work, we'll do a Toys "R" Us one-- and that one obviously is not going to work-- and so we'll do another one. So we try-- we keep outputting them until we find one that works. So here's a reel of our current work. Let's see if this will play.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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RAMY HANNA: So that's a little bit of the work that we do. A little bit about how we got to that point. Yeah, we will get to VR, but I think it's important to talk through the technology and how it's evolved. And so long time ago, this is what people used to do. They just used to draw. So this was my drawing from first grade-- so my first drawing, but a drawing from first grade. I found it and I thought it'd be cool to put that-- but I always like drawing. It was always something that was kind of fun. I always liked visual things and so I'd watch television. I loved watching Chuck Jones and Tex Avery and Walt Disney cartoons, and I was very drawn to visuals at a young age. Well in the early 90s, I was introduced to the personal computer.

We got my first 386 in the early 90s, and I think it had two gigs of RAM. I could run games like this. Does anyone know what game this is? Monkey Island 2, yes. So I love these games and the games are great, but I was really what I really liked about them were the visuals. I loved the backgrounds and the environments.

So I found out who the artist was that did the backgrounds, and I wrote to him. In this case, it was Peter Chan, and he wrote back to me and sent me some of his artwork. I thought it was really cool, because he wrote back to me. So I was kid, I was like, yeah, this is cool, but I was very captivated by the imagery and in the environment that he could create. Your mind would go to a place that really you felt like you were there.

So here a couple more of his sketches. He had this very nice whimsical look to it. It was very Chuck Jones-esque. That was my intro into technology and this was all back in DOS, and then Windows 3.1 came out. This was I think, '92. I had Windows and I would tinker around with it. I'd always try to figure out how to create a little graphics, and the Paint program that they had. That was always fun.

Then in '93, this movie came out. It's a really cool movie, if you think about it, because the people in the movie-- for the first time-- they're seeing dinosaurs in real life. As we're watching it, we're watching a CG'd dinosaur in real life. We're watching CG in realism for the first time. So it's a nice parallel, I thought. It's really cool to see the artistic and the technology come together to create something like this-- which I thought was really cool.

Then in '94, I was introduced to 3D Studio 4, and all I could create were cylinders and boxes and basic shapes. All right-- and this was in DOS. It was very simple to use, but it was fun. I'd play around with it and tinker around with it, and in '95, Toy Story came out. It was the first full feature CG film. When I saw it I was like, this is it. This is where technology is going.

This is what I want to do. I want to be a part of that. So I was in high school, and I didn't know what to do with my-- I had this art thing, and I liked computers. When I was in high school, I took this Auto CAD class. It was Auto CAD Release 12. The teacher would give us a top view, a side view, or right view, and all these different things, and we had to create this 3D object, and so that was a lot of fun. So I knew-- I was like, all right, this is kind of what I want to do

I went to college and I studied architecture. This is our architecture studio in Texas A&M. We had to create projects like this. And the professor would be like, all right, you need an X-ACTO knife, and you need some glue and scissors. I was terrible at it. I was really bad at it, I'd pull my teeth out. This is me. This is what happened to me after I'd create those models. So I would go to the professor and say, well, can I do this on the computer? Some of my professors would say, no-- but some of them would say, yes-- and so I would create. They'd say, yeah, instead of doing it practically, you can create a model.

This is a terrible model, by the way. This is really bad work, but it was the first time I could explore something on a computer in 3D space. The thought that I could create something and then navigate through it in 3D, I was fascinated by it. I was blown away that I could do that on the computer. It's kind of like a child playing in the sandbox. They're just playing and experimenting. The fact that I could come up with something that I didn't have before, I was pretty excited about that-- so thank you, George Mann-- on the left. He's my professor.

In grad school, I did some animated stuff. This was a student project, and then this was another animated short that I created. Then in grad school, I also made the basic walkthroughs and fly throughs. This was the first time I'd done maybe an architectural type piece. It's really not very good, but it was good enough to get me a job. So because of this, I got my first job.

I started doing renderings like this, right? This is in 3D Max. It's scanline. I think it was just radiosity. It wasn't anything fancy. This is another one that's using scanline and radiosity, but I learned how to do these renderings, right? It's very different from the works that we're doing now, right? It's very different from the renderings that you see today that look very photographic and look photoreal. You've come to see these so much that you kind of expect them. It's just kind of commonplace where-- oh, we need someone to do a rendering, here's a rendering, right?

This one is also the Austonian. It's an interior residential space. This one is in Austin. It's called The WALSH. So they may look great, but then you're like OK, we're used to seeing these Autodesk promotes them quite a bit. So now what? What's the next thing? So that's when we started playing with more technology. VR and some other things. So this is really where we get into the meat of what VR is.

When you hear VR what do you think of? When you hear VR, you probably think of a headset, right? Think of that headset, you put it on your head, and that's what VR is. That's what I think of, when I hear VR. So I said, what I'm going to look up the definition of VR. So according to the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, VR is obviously an "abbreviation for virtual reality, a set of images and sounds produced by a computer, that seem to represent a place or a situation that person can take part in."

It's the idea that something's produced by the computer and a person is taking part in. I thought, well if that's the case, there are lots of things that are defined as VR, right? If you took the computer component out of it, you start thinking about old technology where someone is interacting with something. It's not just static. It's not an image, but someone is interacting with an object.

This is a praxinoscope. It's the successor to the zoetrope back in 1877. It's been around for a very long time. This may be the very first VR. This was invented back in '62, called the sensorama. It has 3D, a wide vision, motion, color-- everything that our current VR headsets that we think of have-- but what's really cool about this, I saw that it has aromas. So maybe it's got perfumes? What if you're out in the field-- it smells like flowers? I don't know-- wind? It's got vibrations, so that could be considered VR, right? You guys all know this, the View-Master. I used to have it as a kid. It was cool, because it was stereo. You have the left image and the right image and it worked together, where you could see stereo. It was a very affordable way to view things in a different way.

We often don't think of video games as VR, but in a way it is, right? You're interacting with a computer and it's doing something, and so there's an interactive component to it, right? Then you remember the Nintendo, the blaster, where you can play duck hunting and shoot the ducks? I always thought that was really cool. They took it one step further and they came out with the Power Glove. Do you remember the Power Glove? Here's a clip.

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[MUSIC - HUGO MONTENEGRO, "THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY"]

- What is that?

- I don't know.

RAMY HANNA: It's like, it's a weapon, right?

- Power Glove.

- Geez.

- I love the Power Glove. It's so bad.

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RAMY HANNA: I think that's great. I love the Power Glove. It's so bad. They also came out with the Power Pad. I don't know you remember this. It's an interactive thing where you can jump on it like you're doing track and field.

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- You better get ready for the most challenging Nintendo system ever!

- Ready? Let's do it.

- The new Power Pad. It's only available in Nintendo's new Power Set. Now you're playing with body power! You've got to run, jump. Faster! Higher! The Nintendo Power Pad puts you in total control. You are the game. You are the power! Now you're playing with power. Body power! You get the power pack control deck, zapper and three games only in Nintendo's exciting new Power Set.

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RAMY HANNA: So it's kind of cheesy commercial, but you think about it, he says you are the computer, you are the power. You are the computer itself, driving it. So there's something interesting about that. We're interacting with technology in a different way, right? I went to Six Flags sometime in high school, and I came across this. For $50, you could pay this guy and you could play for 10 minutes. Some weird type of VR, but this is back in the 90s, so they had they had technology like this. Here's a clip on VR from the 90s, which is kind of interesting.

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- Flying over Mars take a trek through a prehistoric jungle. Tour a house that has not yet been built. It's called virtual reality, and Jay Schadler found out all it takes is a special helmet and a glove, and you're off.

RAMY HANNA: You're gone, John. You're history.

- It's a computer generated world where you see, and move, and feel. Will real life ever be the same?

- From ABC News--

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RAMY HANNA: So you know it's kind of funny, because you look at that, and people, at the time said, people won't be able to tell the difference between reality and the computer. Your look at that today and you laugh, because. It's terrible graphics. This also leads into AR and I'm not going to talk about it too much, but AR is kind of an extension of VR, I think, It's really a technology that superimposes the computer-generated image onto a user's view, right-- in the real world. So it's a composite view.

So what's cool about AR is, it's in the real world. You have probably seen these sidewalk sketches where from a certain angle, it looks like it's real. When you get to a different angle, obviously, it doesn't line up. So it's kind of this trompe l'oeil where it's fooling the eye. That's kind of what AR is. It's kind of like it's superimposing it into your real world perspective and view.

You all know Pokemon GO, right? So that's basically AR. IKEA has some apps now where you can place furniture into your living room and see what it looks like. As you move your camera around, it's pretty cool. It works. The furniture kind of sticks to the floor, and so it's kind of fun. This is a demo that Epic put together of a game, and you can play games in AR as well. All right.

What's cool about AR-- I really think this is going to be the future of VR, because in VR, the idea that you have this headset on, you're kind of confined to a certain space. With AR, it's the real world that you live in. It's like you're just wearing your regular glasses, and you can talk to people and you can interact with them. This person just walking around a table, he can talk to the person that he's playing with so it's pretty cool.

OK I guess we know what VR is. So what are some of the uses of VR? What can we use it for? Obviously, it's useful, but we're using it in training. There's a lot of training. It's used in the medical field, which is interesting. This is an image from a UTMB pilot program. The goal of the study is to test various technologies that could be employed in the teleguidance of non-trained personnel in the performance of simple anesthesia and surgical procedures.

So this idea that maybe someone who's trained is telling someone who's not trained how to do a surgical procedure-- that sounds a little terrifying. I don't know if I want a non-trained person cutting my body open-- but if they can see what the other person is seeing, it's very helpful, right? It's great for training.

The military uses this quite a bit. This is actually the Netherlands Army, and they're training at the 7th US training center. Then here the military is using it for a Stryker Brigade. This was back in 2016. This was the 4th Infantry Division and the US Armed Forces deployed to seize and secure an oil pipeline, in the imaginary country of Atropia. It's training though, right? So when they have to do it in real life, they'll know how to do it.

It's also used in therapy which is good. VR Kids is doing some really cool things where there are children in hospitals that can't leave, because they have low immune systems. So they can get this VR experience and they can experience things that they can't like other kids can. It's pretty cool.

It's also been used in some research studies. This is a research study that has deployed an ingenious system that uses VR to help prevent falls by detecting and reversing balance impairments in elderly people. It's interesting. I don't know if it works but it's an interesting theory.

Clearly, it's been used in entertainment. Bjork came out with a music video back in 2015. She did a 360 video several years ago now. Dancing with the Stars also had a 360 deal where-- a lot of these entertainment things now, they'll have a camera right on the stage so you can watch people all around you. The really cool thing about it is, you can watch the same video four times, and it'll be a completely different experience, because one time you're looking at piano player, the next time you're looking at the dancers. It's very interesting. All right.

Obviously, it's used in gaming. We actually have some VR games for testing purposes in our office. You guys are probably more interested in how you can use it for design and for your business, right? This is an automotive show. This is the New York Auto Show. Toyota and Chrysler are using it to show people how-- this is Oculus Rift. You can sit in the standard car, but then you can experience a newer design. They can change the design out. It's kind of an interesting way to use it. And then our friends-- I asked Paul if we could play this-- our friends at Factory 15 have a video on how they incorporate design in VR. It's interesting so--

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- Virtual Cities is an art installation initially constructed at the Factory Gallery in London.

RAMY HANNA: Can y'all hear that?

- It exists both physically and virtually. Physically, it's a formation of foam blocks, which you can walk around and sit on assembled as an abstract cityscape. Virtually is an immersive digital painting drawn in the exact position of the blocks using tilt brush.

We use the HTC Vive to scan the space giving an accurate position of the blocks visually within the headsets, transporting you to this virtual city. The VR experience is heightened as you walk through the space and touch the physical towers. This makes for a far more immersive feeling as haptic feedback, and a connection to the real world is amplified. Our creative director Paul Nichols painted an abstract cityscape over the course of two weeks on top of the blocks in VR.

- So I'm really interested in creating art and installations, which combine immersive mediums with physical spaces. VR is obviously very immersive, but very disconnected with the physical world. So this tries to connect the two in an artistic format.

- Both the painting process and the resulting artwork, was projected onto the gallery wall as a form of visual theater. The digital painting from virtual cities can be downloaded straight to the VIVE, or viewed on desktop through Sketchpad.

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RAMY HANNA: Thank you Paula for letting me show that. You can actually download that model and then test it out. It's pretty cool. He painted that using Tilt Brush, so it's very interesting. Designers can also use it with their other models. Here's a Revit model. This is an example of how they brought it into Tilt Brush. They imported the model into Tilt Brush, and in 3D space, he's simply sketching what he may think. This may be a soft seating space, this may be a dining area, et cetera. It's sped up, so apologies if you're getting motion sick. It shows the idea of being in the space and designing.

It's very different from seeing it either on a computer screen or just drawing with a piece of paper, traditionally. But being in this immersive environment, it gives you a sense of scale, right? You can kind of walk around it and figure out what the spaces are. You may think about, oh, this is where the structure needs to go, or this chair may be too wide, or that table's too tall-- then you can start throwing dropping materials on it. It's a different completely different way to design.

It's also used in sales and obviously is used for marketing and selling. This is Matterport's technology and real estate agents love this, because they can sell a space. You can go see a space if you want to go on a vacation in Florida. You don't have to physically go there. You can go onto the website and go through the tour. You know exactly what the space is going to look like.

This is it's pretty cool. This is photogrammetry technology where this camera's in a built environment. It takes a picture but then it also creates a 3D mesh from the photography, and it combines the two. So that's pretty cool technology. It's also used in leasing offices. In the case of Capital Tower, this was one of the objectives-- why we created it. The developer that we did this project for had a leasing office. They wanted to host an Oculus VR experience headset, where you can look at the building, and give potential tenants an idea of what it would look like.

This is another example that we created. This is a real-time environment or walk through. This was done with Unreal. You can view this either on your computer-- but obviously, you can do it with a headset on, and walk through the space using controllers, and navigate through the space. It's one thing to see it on the screen, but if you have the headset on, it's a completely different experience. You can see the proximity of where the couch is to the coffee table, and really know what the space feels like. So in this example, you can change different furniture and materials.

So in 2016, CGarchitect put this out. It's a little dated, but it was interesting to see what the playing field for headsets are, right-- to see who are the major performers, what studios are investing in what type of headsets. It's a couple of years old and the technology is always changing, but I find it very interesting. So this is the list that I came up with. I think these are the major heavy hitters. There's somebody they did not put on here, but these are the major ones. In our studio, are artist's favorite is actually the Oculus Rift. We really like the controllers. They're very intuitive. I feel like they're not as clunky as HTC, but we also like the-- what do they call it-- the app store that it has, too. It seemed very versatile. It has a lot of apps.

It's interesting because the two of them have different app stores, and so you're kind of committing to one type of software once you get a headset. We have both and so we're not you know we're not biased towards one, but we use both, more for developing. Then earlier this year, the device came out with the VIVE Pro. We actually purchased one to try it out and it wasn't really, in my opinion, it wasn't really that much different from the original VIVE yet. In my opinion, I would wait until something else comes out, but if anyone works for HTC, I'm sorry.

Playstation has their own headset, and then these are some of the portable headsets. The gears is probably the most common one, where you can stick like a Galaxy Samsung phone. Put it in there and then you can stick it in your backpack and travel with it, which is really cool.

Just recently, Oculus came out with Oculus Go, and I think this is awesome, because it doesn't require a phone. It's got a little USB thing, and you can plug it into your computer, and you can load whatever apps you have on it. You can send it to your client, and they can-- if it's set up-- you can just put it on, and it'll go-- which is that's why it's called Oculus Go, but it's pretty cool. This is I think it's only like a $100, $200. $200, whereas this the case itself, is like maybe $40-- but then the phone is like $600.

The HoloLens is an AR headset. This is actually like $1,000, so it's a little more expensive. You've all seen the Google Cardboard, which is kind of a nice, cheap way to do things quickly, if you have like an event. We've used it and it's been very successful for its purpose.

So a little bit about Capital Tower. This is a project that's in Houston. It's the developer Skanska, and the architects of the building is Gensler. Gensler designed the building, and then we did some renderings for Skanska and Gensler to flesh out what it's going to look like. So right now, the glass is up. It's still under construction, but they're moving at a very aggressive pace. It's almost done and it looks just like that now. So we did also video of it, and so this is a little bit of what it looks like.

Houston has a metro rail. It's the only metro rail in the city, so that was a big amenity they wanted to show off. We wanted to show what the glass looked like. The glass is important. This is kind of the atrium space, and this is a very early concept. It's not going to look quite like that, but at the time. We didn't know what it was going to look like, so we had to come up with something conceptual. We worked with the architect back and forth to say, yeah, this looks good. It's going to be very close to this actually.

So we did a video, but in addition to the video, we also wanted to do a tour. So I'm going to show you the tour.

I don't know that my internet is working real well, so I've got a video here. It's just as good-- versus me just driving it around. So the idea is this 360 video, and so we created the animation, but we also put it into a 360 environment so you can look around the entire space bus. The building is animating around you, which is interesting.

So there's several things going on. There's the user control with their head, but then there's also the video that's playing. It's kind of a static video playing. So it's possible that you could look one direction, and miss animation going on in one part of it. So you have to think about where's the viewer going to look, which is interesting. Then once it's finished being built up, this is kind of what gets played, and it has motion of people. It's got moving cars. It's loading here. There it goes. So we have a barista, and we obviously we have like a food kiosk.

So they wanted to show the activity. It's one thing to show it static, but it's another thing to show what it looks like when it's in motion, and what's when it's moving. It adds a whole other dimension to it. Then obviously, you click-- you know how these tours work-- you click on a hot spot and takes you to that location. So I'm showing you the end result, and then I'm going to show you how we got to that point.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RAMY HANNA: You can. Yeah, you can in real-time, you can.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RAMY HANNA: Well, I don't I won't do it now. I'll break my computer. But what's cool about this, it's web based. If you go to this URL right now, you can do it on your phone. It works right now. The animation, it's basically a 360 video. Now what's interesting about it because it's 360, the videos are very large. I think we had to render them at 6K. So that was an issue, and trying to get the file size down was is an issue. So what we came up with is, we could only play these for so long. We could only play these videos-- the video could only be like 15 seconds. If the video got longer than 15 seconds, you're looking at like a 50 megabyte video that you have to download off the internet and stream. So that was an issue.

The file format-- we start off with MP4s, and we found that MP4s are OK, but we discovered the WebM format. Yeah, it's a very small file size, and it works on web browsers. I don't know why, but it does. It's a pretty cool format and it's significantly smaller than the MP4, and so it's a new file format, which is pretty cool. So that's what we used to make this workable, and so we could get just several megabytes. We could get a 15 second, 6K video to work on the internet.

So as far as the design, it was halfway thought out. The developer said this is kind of what we want. So here's the floor plan. We want tunnel activity. Here we want a bridge scene. We want coffee kiosks here. We want different items in different areas. So we had the model, because we already had the animation done. So we started redesigning what that space is actually going to look like. So we would send this to our client, and they would come back with these markups and say, this is what we want the kiosk to look like. This is what we want for outside seating and inside seating. So rather than have to do a rendering and render it out, we can just send them these screenshots that they can understand what these look like, all right?

Here's another screenshot. So this is the restaurant area that we started designing out, and then this is the tunnel area. We're artists OK? We can't type. We can't spell. Different types of kiosks, right? But they got it, right? I think is one of our younger artists that did this, and we give him a hard time because he admittedly says, I can't spell. I can draw. That's about it.

So this is the restaurant area. This is what it looks like, and then here's kind of the seating area in the atrium space. So we can send these to them, and very quickly they say, yeah this is what we're thinking. We also did this internally where we would render this out, and then we would do markups on top of it for ourselves to figure out what is it we want it to look like. When we did the animation, this is what the space looked like. For the VR tour, we wanted to update it, and so we wanted updates. Some of these kiosk areas, we need some of the planting changed.

Our client never saw these comments. This is all internal. So we would update it, and then there were comments about, well what does this wall need to be? What material does it want to be? You always hear designers say that. Chris [INAUDIBLE] is laughing. So we played with different types of materials for that. Maybe it needs to be something that's like a video screen.

At one point, we're talking about making it interactive space, making it a video screen. We ended up putting this on a different wall, but these are just simple quick tests to see what it would look like.

And this is the office space. These are the 360 renders, but very quickly, we would explain to our clients that this is the image that gets put into a 3D environment. Once it's in the tour, you can navigate, but this is the input for it, and very quickly they could understand what this looks like. They understand what these images are and, I think it's kind of a new way of understanding rendering. So they can see the entire space in one image. There there's a lot of value to that. Instead of just saying, I need an image here and image here, we can send this to them and they can markup-- this wall here is the same wall that's over here. And it became very useful tool just in design.

So we did a couple of different office concepts. I think this may be the one we went with. So there was also a roof terrace, which was very important. The roof terrace was an important factor. This is the site plan that we got from Gensler, and they said there you go. We had to figure it out. So very quickly in 3D, we would start, this is the Max, we'd start putting foliage and hard scape, furniture to give them an idea of what the space is going to look like. Then very quickly we realized, this is a rendering and very quickly realized that the important thing about the roof terrorists the selling point are the views, right? So the views are really important, especially if you're doing a 360 tour. So we didn't have any of the views, and so we had to go on site on to the roof terrace and shoot it, so we used our toys here.

So this is an icon 360 camera. It only has two lenses. It's good for really quick tests. This is another one. There's an Insta 360 camera and it's got more lenses on it. This one can do 6K video as well as stills. So we use some of those on site. This is the site right here on the roof terrace. The roof terrace is not even halfway up. I want to say it's the 10th floor or something like that. The 12th floor? OK. Chester knows.

And so we would shoot all of the surrounding buildings, and this is me on my SLR. This is what we ended. This is what we shot. It is what we had to work with because it's a constructions. We had a paint out all of these cranes. Obviously, they're not going to halt construction for our works, and so we had to work around that, and they were at a very aggressive schedule. I think they were doing pouring four floors a week, something crazy like that, so we had to paint these out-- and so this is what we ended up.

This is a photo stitch. After we Photoshop all the cranes out, , get the right time of the day and everything down here, you don't really get in 3D so if that goes away, you're only really concerned with what's here. Actually, you're not even concerned with what's over here, because our building is going to be part of the view. These are the still renderings that we did for the roof terrace. I think they turned out pretty good. That's one thing for the still renderings, but then about the activity in the animation. How do we add that? So for the people, we green screen them in, and so you have to think about each rendering.

So we would we'd sit there, and you can kind of see, like here is a printout of the 360 view. We would quickly sketch where the people would go in the space to get the angles just right, because we knew exactly where each of these people were going to go. It wasn't like we just shot people and then try to figure out how we could fit them in. We knew exactly when we shot them where in the rendering they were going to go. So for example, like this guy is the barista, this guy is going to buy some coffee. So we'd shoot them separately. but we knew that the angles had to work together, because eventually, they would be in the same scene. .

So this is this the back plate. We would render this in Max as a still, and then everything else goes on top of it-- animated-- so there is the animation. So the people were shot green screen. Everything else that you see moving, we have some 3D people in the background. Those were rendered in so. We rendered 360 image sequences like the cars, the train, all that activity was rendered in.

Also what we learned is, that if you keep everything kind of in this area right here, like the middle third of your image, you're not going to get distortion, because it's pretty even. You really only get distortion on the bottom and on the top. So you're OK with superimposing or in post, putting things on top of it you're not going to really get distortion. So with the 360, the spherical images are actually very forgiving in that aspect.

When we first started thinking about it, we thought well this isn't going to work. How are we going to do this in post? But it actually does work fairly well. It's actually fairly simple to do. Then on the technical side, we do this in 3ds Max, and we use vray for our spherical images. And there it's really much simpler than you would think. If you haven't done it before, there are only really two settings that you have to look at in VRF. There is a setting under the camera roll out. You have to change this to spherical from the default camera, and then you have to check the override field of view, and switch that to 360. So that makes it a 360 field of view. You're rendering everything from one camera view.

The nice thing about doing it with one rendering is that you get the same GI, and you get the same lighting solution for the entire space. In the old days, we had each shoot a view for every a box. You had to shoot six different sides. This is just one image. Then the other key is, you have to make the aspect ratio 2. So it's twice as long as it is high. That's very important.

Then the last factor is, make sure that the camera's level. If the camera is at an angle, once you get your 360 into the software, you start looking around at this weird angle. It doesn't really work. Then the last factor is, you have to have it eye height, so make sure that's roughly six foot. If it's too high, then you feel like you're much taller. If it's too low, you feel like you're sitting, even though you're supposed to be standing. So some of that is trial and error, because people are different heights. So you have to find this kind of nice middle ground.

And then from there, we render these out. And there are lots of programs out there to do 360 tours. There are a lot of them out there, and some of them are really good and some of them are not so good. So the ones that we prefer are actually KRpano and Unreal It's kind of either-or. We use both for different situations. This one is mostly for the mobile headsets. If we're using a gear, we'll do it in Unreal. This is really good for a web based platform. Then in an addition, we do there is some scripting we do to make it work well, but out of the box it works really well.

So this is how you use KRpano So you take your 360 renderings, you dump it into this batch file, and then it starts compiling. What it's doing is, it's taking that 360 image and it's creating different resolutions. It's creating the XML and it's creating the HTML for the tour and so it's all automated. You don't have to know any of the code, which is nice. It creates this folder, and there's your tour. If you want to customize it, you can bring it into this KRpano's tool, drag the Excel file over here, and it will pull it in. You can see your tour, and you can start adding hot spots.

So here, you can add hot spots. You can click and drag them anywhere you want. And when it's where you want it, you choose which other view it's going to go to. Hit Save, and then you go. The key to get this to work is your images all have to be the same resolution. If there is one that's not the right-- like if you have one that's 6k, and another one that's 4K, it's not going to work, because of the multi res. So it's very important that the same resolution. Other than that, that's how it works.

You can get into a little bit in the code. There are some nice tools in this that to make it work. What's really nice about it is, it works on your web browser. It works on a PC, or works on your mobile, so it's not Flash. It works on iPad, so on almost any platform, it works. It has this nice VR button where you can use a headset on it too. It's very versatile for as small as it is. Yeah, so there it is. I'm testing it out. So you click this VR thing, and if you have a headset, it will work. We did this also for a groundbreaking event when we revealed the building.