Media Facade Modeling / Rendering Question

[epelj1]

I'm working on a school project, a 27 story hotel. I'm wanting to use some time of media facade on it, making the entire building basically an electronic billboard. I'm looking at a product made by ag4 called Illumesh, I'd post a link, but I don't think I'm allowed to yet.

 

Anyway, I'd thought I'd get your guys' opinions on how to go about modeling and rendering something like that? I'm not planning on doing any close up shots, atleast not of it being lit. For rendering, I've tried a VrayBlendMtl, with a VrayLtMtl and a simple .mov file. That seemed to work failry well, and was somewhat transparent. For modelling, I've tried simple 1"x whatever strips around the building, but that didn't accept the material very well. It got the same look that bricks get when you look at them from too small of a scale.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks!

[Devin Johnston]

I'd create a plane, apply my material with the animation in the diffuse channel and then apply a map of small dots to the opacity channel. That will should create the effect you see in the Illumesh, then you can size the dot map to represent the size of each of the little LED's.

[alias_marks]

Here's something I did all in photoshop (with cs3 animation tools) on top of some existing stills I had already done. Don't know what type of animation you're doing, but for simple ken burns pans, this worked great, and was right quick to play around with/tweak, and be flexible (about 1 days worth of work)

 

http://vimeo.com/1883178

 

1. Brought in some videos

2. Masked them out over screen areas.

3. To add some glow and illuminance: Duplicated movie layer, change to screen transfer mode, gausian blur a bit, expand and feather mask, play with opacity.

 

*footnote, permission was granted by vfx artists to use their work in this experimental piece.

Edited October 27, 2009 by alias_marks
The link might be helpful :)

[alias_marks]

Also, just had to post this cause it's flippin amazing and fits the theme -

[Ramzeen]

Here is an ILLumesh projection close-up image hope this helps in any way.

[FlytE]

I'd create a plane, apply my material with the animation in the diffuse channel and then apply a map of small dots to the opacity channel. That will should create the effect you see in the Illumesh, then you can size the dot map to represent the size of each of the little LED's.

 

For what its worth, i would also do it this way.

[AndyC]

Sorry, is this an animation or a still?

[Devin Johnston]

I'd think an animation otherwise why use a .mov file.

[epelj1]

Thanks for all the help! Both options have their perks.

 

The end result will be a combination of stills and an animation, but out of curiosity Andy, where were you going with that? Would you handle the two in seperate ways?