Built in 1908 the Empress Hotel has seen many renos and restorations over the years. This time the hotel needed to have some extensive exterior maintenance done and required a building wrap to cover up the scaffolding around the main original section of the hotel. Originally, high res photographs were going to be used to create the full size image of the hotel's famous facade but ivy covered up too much of the building and the overall condition of the exterior made it difficult to source adequate images. Clint Hutzulak at Rayola Creative contacted me to see the viability of supplying 3d renders of the building to provide a base for retouched and composited photographs. In tandem with Rayola working on the giant photoshop files, my 3d renders were textured and stitched together to complete this mammoth project.
An overall simplified model of the building was created to establish lighting and to assess the level of detail required for the final images.
The Hotel's owners supplied elevation drawings and input to create the 3d model from.
Larger specific building elements were created with more detail including some subtle surface sculpting.
Here above, you can see the sculpted detail and texturing applied onto the 3d render. Click to zoom in.
The renders were supplied in a white clay style finish, clean and bright and ready for texturing in photoshop at Rayola.
A couple of screens of the Blender UI.
Here is the final wrap being installed on the hotel. The large scale nature, wide public location and very tight turnaround of this project demanded an accurate result in every step of the creation process.
