Sitting on an incredibly complex site, in one of the most famous places on earth, REX’s Perelman Performing Arts Center was in development for almost two decades, finally opening in 2023. Prior to the opening, my employer, Brooklyn Digital Foundry, was approached to create a video highlighting the building’s unique architecture. We also created the still images you can see on this page, taking advantage of the detail lavished on the model and a very photogenic site.
See the video here!
Here you can see a selection of work highlighting my contributions to the project, primarily the creation of the context environment. Much of this project was created by the BDF team from scratch in 3ds Max. The site being what it is, the chances of getting approved for drone photography were practically nil. The result being that almost everything visible in the images and videos is “in camera,” with some pretty light post processing.
Furthermore, it was important to maintain a high attention to detail in order to faithfully and respectfully recreate a site that is well-known and culturally significant. The 9/11 Memorial was treated with particular care. This care led to some very in-depth work to try and make the model of the site accurate. From studying design documents online, to spending hours looking at Google Maps Streetviews, and even taking time to visit the site during a trip to New York. The client only provided rough models outside of their building, pretty much all of the context was modeled from public data.
This in-camera approach is time consuming, and would not be appropriate for all projects, but the result is something I am very happy with. Because the scene is so comprehensive, there is a lot of freedom in the camera placement. Many more angles could be set up with only minor changes to the entourage and lighting. REX’s building itself sits in the light so beautifully and is a great subject for (CG) photography. It is also definitely worth a visit in real life.
Thanks to my colleagues at Brooklyn Digital Foundry: Josh Hollander and Chris Cerrone, who did pretty much everything besides the context, including the beautiful video compositing, awesome crowd simulations, the luxurious treatment of the theater itself, and the amazing shot work. And thanks to our interns, Jonathan Lim, and Mike Gaynor, who did splendid work contributing to the environment model.
Breakdown
Context Buildings
1 World Trade Center
One of the most prominent assets I created is the model of 1 World Trade Center. The model is very accurate and parts are detailed for relatively close cameras, but also extends to the full 1,368 feet of building plus 408 feet of spire.
The facade mostly consists of a Railclone system, which allowed me to take advantage of Railclone’s instancing system and the ability to display as a box in the 3ds Max viewport. In order to get Railclone to work with the angled facade, I came up with a system of using carefully sized splines for each floor. Each spline had to fall exactly in the right spot, in order for the windows to align properly. The angled and straight facades each had their own set of segments, with the angled ones adapted to fit the slope of the building while remaining the same height. These were carefully modeled rather than left up to a deformer. A system which was somewhat difficult to set up, but once built, was highly stable and rendered very efficiently. The facade Railclone contains nearly 15,000 window panels, which would have been quite a pain to model by hand. Of course, modelling this building only took a couple of days. Actually installing 15,000, 13-foot tall window units must have been quite a task for the glaziers.
The facade of the windowless, security block on the bottom section of the building is also a Railclone. This let me take advantage of Railclone’s mathematics nodes to replicate the slight bulging effect in the design. Each panel on this part of the facade has a hinged glass flange attached to it. These flanges are carefully angled so that they hinge out at a greater angle towards the center of each face of the building. It was very difficult to get a read on exactly what the facade was doing here from photographs alone, so it was serendipitous that the first approach I tried in Railclone ended up replicating real life quite well.
The roof spire was originally not visible from any camera angles, so it was left till later in the project. My colleague, Josh Hollander, modelled a rough version for the video, and then I came in and detailed it for the stills. Being the top of the tallest building in New York, it is a difficult part of the building to get pictures of. We made an effort to get things right, but ended up needing to add in a bit of invented pizazz. There are antennas galore up here, leading to some fun chaos. Oftentimes, clients like to remove these extra touches of real-life clutter, so it was fun to get to work on them in forensic detail.
10 Barclay
I largely extended the same approach to the rest of the context buildings, though I also used more traditional modeling methods for the facades. 10 Barclay started off as just a rough poly model, but was elaborated on several times to add detail, ultimately advancing to this point for the aerial image. While it isn’t as detailed as some of the closer sites, it adds a lot of interesting texture to the shots in which it appears.
2 and 3 World Trade Centers
The site of 2 World Trade Center is currently still undeveloped, with the exception of the air conditioning system for the mall below it. I ended up modelling this site twice, once for the current conditions, and again for the current development proposal. The proposed building posed some challenges, as the only public information available at the time were a handful of renderings provided by Foster + Partners. The current site posed other challenges as it is a complicated web of overlapping and intertwined vents and pipes with not much for reference besides the odd helicopter photo and Google Earth images. Ultimately the client decided to go with the finished Foster + Partners building, but I had a lot of fun modeling the vents (Railclone again). 3 World Trade Center followed a similar process, but luckily only part of it needed to be modelled.
Brookfield Place
Brookfield Place is an enormous building, with four towers connected by a mall and skybridge, stretching over 1,300 feet along the West Side Highway. It’s imposing size led to it appearing in the background of many shots. Luckily only the parts North of Liberty Street ended up needing to be modelled in detail. I built a rough mass for the whole thing, just to cast shadows. It uses a similar modelling method to 1–3WTCs, building the entire facade in Railclone. This building had the greatest variety of panels, but it ended up being easy to transfer the setup across the 3 main towers.
Trees
The trees in the memorial are a particular variety of White Oak, and I couldn’t find one from the studio’s library that quite matched the visual profile and size. Since these were going to appear in every shot, I decided to generate my own using GrowFX. GrowFX gave me the opportunity to easily add wind animation, and generate variety auto-magically. In order to keep things tight, I kept the wind simulation to about 100 frames and made it loopable in GrowFX, and then cached them out as VRay proxies. Animation offsets in Forest Pack prevent introducing any noticeable repetition. I went out of my way to keep the poly count low-ish (lowfor offline rendering anyways), trying to balance visual fidelity and the need to not clog the network and server RAM with huge files.
The rest of the trees only appear in the background, so I just used stripped down Evermotion assets. It saves a lot to cut down the leaves to quads and to take a lot of geometry out of the trunks, and it makes no visual difference when the tree is more than 100 feet away.
For the still images, I created alternate versions of the Swamp White Oak. higher resolution and without any animation. The GrowFX was switched to use metameshes for some of the limbs so that the branches would cleanly blend into the shape of the trunk. I also slightly edited the materials so that the trees would still look nice in a 5K render.
Memorial Garden
The memorial garden was a big priority, since it appeared in almost every shot. The hardscaping on the ground was meticulously reconstructed from plans and aerial photography. The design includes many bands of different materials, which are all built as separate, interlocking objects. A general terrain shape was modelled first, the bands second, which were then conformed to the first shape. Holes were cut for various buildings, and for the memorial fountains.
The memorial fountains were very carefully modelled in order to capture the memorial in a respectful manner. The corners on the railing panels were tricky to get right, as they aren’t easily visible. I had taken some photos of the fountains on a trip several years earlier, and was able to leverage those on top of publicly available photography. The general dimensions are public knowledge, but it was helpful to do this extra research to the specifics, especial for areas normally covered in water.
The water is not simulated, and instead uses a system of PhoenixfdOceanTex blending to give the illusion of flow. The flow direction is determined by the UV layout, while the seams are covered up by blending a second UV layout using a vertex color mask. Flow speed is changed by stretching the UVs of that particular section. The foam is from a PhoenixfdFoamTex and is blended using another vertex color mask as an alpha. This solution ended up being very fast to render and didn’t require any simulation at all.
The 9/11 Memorial museum was another interesting challenge. The building is a very non-standard shape, and the deconstructivist design was not simple to replicate. A lot of careful study led to what I think is a very close approximation, even the chaotically arranged steel beams in the lobby window. There are even escalators from street level into the museum, but the glass thankfully hides a lot of the interior detail.
Police Tesla
The streets around the 9/11 Memorial and World Trade Center are closed to vehicular traffic, and only official vehicles are allowed to be in the area. They are usually pretty free of traffic, but I wanted to add some extra life into the still renderings. The studio’s library included some generic police vehicles, but I wanted something a bit more specific. I looked through the list of NYPD vehicles, and I couldn’t find a match for anything in the library, until I noticed at the bottom that they had recently (at the time) announced the purchase of some Teslas. We did in fact have a Tesla Model S from Turbosquid on hand, and I thought it would look cool and sporty (even though the real cars were to be Model 3s).
I took the Turbosquid model, did some clean up on it, layed out the UVs for the body panels, and then set about painting a texture using Substance Painter. I added some dirt and grunge, which is easy to do in Substance, but the hard part ended up being designing the livery and applying it to the car. I made stencils in Photoshop for the various designs, and then stuck them onto the model as projectors and brushes in Painter. The actual NYPD Teslas had not yet been released when I was doing this, so the design was a bit of a guess, and I am pretty proud that it ended up being somewhat close to the real thing.
Then I added the light bar at the top of the vehicle, which I later found out was not used for the real cars. It is based loosely off of the lightbar from a typical NYPD Ford Explorer. I think the car wouldn’t have looked right without them anyways.