Industrial bar

Just a selection of progress shots from a project I was working on.

Bramley Moore Stadium Final images

An aerial night picture.

A sunset shot from the northeast corner. The HDRI came out a bit harsher than I anticipated.

A day crowd shot

A shot with the roof and wall open from the eastern end.

A shot with the roof and wall closed from the eastern end.

Athletics configuration from the northwest end. I was attempting to add LED lights to the upper eastern end of the venue but the effect didn't really work.

Concourse view 1

Concourse view 2

Crowd shot from the southwest corner.

Crowd shot of the stage from the eastern end.

Stage shot from the floor seats.

Aerial view of the site from the southeast of the site.

Sunset shot from the southwest of the site. That HDRI file was very strong.

A view of the site from the eastern end. I'm not really happy with this shot or how this end turned out. I needed to spend more time on it.

An evening view of the stadium from the northern end.

A night view of the venue from the northeast corner.

A day view of the venue from the northeast corner.

A view from the camera platform of the boxing and MMA configuration

A view of the crowd in the boxing and MMA configuration

Bramley Moore Stadium Construction images: part five!

May 23: I wasn't happy with the original pitch pattern - it looked bland. I replaced it with this horizontal stripe pattern - I think that makes it stand out more.

May 23: More texturing work was done, and the false ceiling was installed. This is on the northern stand.

May 23: And the underside of the home stand. I wanted all of those lights to look somewhat like a night sky, but I don't think I did a good enough job of that.

May 24: Getting ready for the rendering phase of the project, I played around with blooms for the final renders. It didn't turn out exactly as I'd hoped, but it was worth a try. I'd end up using a bloom as a Vray layer, which I'd add in during post-processing (which I will take you through soon).

May 25: More rendering preparation as I get the HDR files positioned as I want them. You can see a reflection of the HDR in Nelson Dock.

May 28: A couple of changes - the site lighting was properly installed. In addition, a ring of lights surrounds the roof. It's subtle but I think it really brought the roof together.

May 28: And a night view from the same spot. I'm really happy with the site lighting. I wish I made the roof lights bigger - it would have made them more noticable and a lot easier to install!

May 30: The last day of modelling. I actually started rendering the full project the day before, but I was having a lot of trouble with the original stage model. I ended up remodelling and making a much more simple stage - I think it sits really nicely with the videoboard behind it.

May 30: One of my favourite shots of the project, it's the first time that it really felt real. Really proud of how well this came together, given I missed two weeks at the start and spent much of early May down sick with the flu.

May 30: My last progress render - the roof is mostly closed for this one. I really wish I took more renders over the course of the project. There's so many things that I never documented and can't show you. But if I had taken the time to document them all, I probably wouldn't have finished the project. Such is life I guess.

Bramley Moore Stadium Construction images: part four!

May 8: Underneath the plaza, a number of key site services are located underneath the plaza. These include the club shop and ticket office (seen above), a restaurant, bar, and storage facility.

May 10: I really wanted to update the seating pattern, so I went with blue into white into black. Really happy with this.

May 13: One of my own biggest concerns with this venue is the scale. This is particularly evidenced in this picture by the western end, which is rather barren and bare. In an attempt to rectify that, I copied a proxy tree from another project I was working on into the open space in the corner. It's basically just a prop but it helps make it not look so empty.

May 13: Serious thought started to go into the landscaping at the western end of the venue - I eventually settled on the OB van area, as well as a small park along the riverfront, with picnic tables, barbecues and other amenities.

May 13: I also finally did the facade on the southern stand - it really wasn't anything special.

May 13: It was a big day of work, and I also took care of all of the numbering on the entry points to the stands. To do this on every single one took well over an hour - but it's worth it as that's one of those small details that really brings the project together. Also, this is a really pretty rendering.

May 17: A pretty small update here - but I think it was a pretty valuable one. Using Google Earth, I was able to find a photograph looking across the River Mersey towards Wallasey. I cut that out (roughly) and attached it to the end of the water in the model. This had several benefits. Firstly, because the image was shot from on the site, it gives a more realistic width to the river. Secondly, it helps to position the stadium on the site and its wider context. 

May 18: Playing around with some of the HDR files I had available. Nothing serious in this one.

May 19: I finally started the texturing process on the site. A lot of brick, concrete, and wood.

May 19: A view of the upper home end concourse. I really loved that brick texture - it looked so modern and realistic.

May 19: One of my favourite shots of the whole project - walking across the gangway to the seating. Interior lights switched off (I even hid the lighting structure on the trusses). It started to feel real and homely.

Bramley Moore Stadium Construction images: part three!

April 17: By this point, I had modelled each of the individual structures for the concourse. The biggest issue now was fitting each of them into their spots in the stadium. Here, each of the structures is being installed between the pillars on the main stand.

April 18: Because each of these structures is very close to the wall, a lighting test was done to ensure that each structure doesn't bleed light out of the venue. As you can see, one of the structures did, leading to light messing up the facade (see the left side of the facade - there's light coming out from underneath the vertical panels.)

April 19: With that sorted, I was able to get back to putting the concourse structures in place. Here they all are in a separate file.

April 19: And a night lighting view. This stage is always one of my least favourite - it's so time consuming and painstaking to get everything right.

April 25: Work on some of the site buildings, including the club offices, two small office buildings, and a large parking structure. Getting some of the at-grade parking to sit properly in the model was incredibly difficult - for some reason, Sketchup refused to recognise the parking layout as being level with the terrain. So very frustrating when that happens.

April 25: And the night view. I added a simple emissive shader to the texture to produce this effect. If I had the chance again, I would have randomised the lit windows and added a proper graphic for the effect. I was quite pressed for time at this point, and with there being only 3 weeks until I wanted all my modelling work done, I never actually did it.

April 27: Back to the interior, this is from the work on the stadium control room. Not so fun fact - each of those laptops were extremely heavy poly models. Time constraints meant I kind of rushed through components like that and never bothered cleaning them up. They all had DVD drives inside of them!

In preparation for the next project, I've already gone and cleaned up a whole bunch of components - no wasting time trying to optimise them with a deadline looming!

April 27: I also got to work on the changing rooms, doping rooms and such. This is a shot from the media room, where interviews with players and managers takes place.

April 28: I finally sorted out the pitch models. This is a view of the football field, with artificial turf covering the athletics track.

May 2: An interior shot of the venue. I added a bunch of lights to the rear of the home stand, lighting up the wall and roof behind it.

May 2: I finally settled on a name for the venue - here it is displayed above the scoreboard!

May 4: Walls around the vomitories and concourses are erected. The gangways to connect the concourse to the seating is installed. It's also at this point that I get sick of that plain blue seating pattern...