Rewilding Sizewell Nuclear Power Station – FINAL images

/0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

Summary

Sizewell Nuclear Power Station is located within an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ in Suffolk, UK. There are 3 reactors – “A” has been decommissioned, “B” is operational and “C” is currently planned for the future. I propose to convert all buildings and site into a series of spaces where visitors can learn about rewilding and explore the importance of maintaining Biodiversity on our small planet.

The site is very large so I decided to focus on two main aspects. The first was an area of land immediately to the West of the main buildings where I proposed to re-wild the area by introducing large herbivores and allowing nature to take its path.

To help support and encourage wildlife, I introduced a lake by flooding some of the existing waterways. Around the lake I’ve designed some animal hides based on collage studies I did early in the process. It is here that visitors can join a “Sizewell Safari”group to observe the animals in nature.
My second area of focus was to create a new dramatic entrance to what is now the turbine hall of Sizewell B. This is where visitors will be able to learn about rewilding, biodiversity and book their Safari tickets.

Substance

This was my first use of the Substance suite and I found using Substance Designer made the material creation process fun. I’ve been able to create various bespoke, procedural materials with exposed parameters that have allowed me to re-use the same .sbsar in multiple places.
The most ambitious exploration for me was to create the lake Substance. Using only 1 external input (a hand drawn black & white shape in Photoshop) I was able to create complex displacement, diffuse colour and roughness. In addition I generated various bespoke, editable output masks, that I used as maps to drive Forest Pack Pro. This allowed me to easily explore plant layout options and species distribution by simply adjusting the exposed parameters.
I also managed to create a procedural timber material that was used for all of the timber – the entrance canopy structure and shading fins, the main staircase and the animal hides cladding.
The turbine hall cladding and context buildings also share the same Substance.
Using Substance Alchemist I managed to create new materials very quickly from texture maps I already had – mostly for the hard landscaping.

Photography

All of the animal photos used in the images were taken by myself.
The existing site “Sizewell B” is an active Nuclear Power Station and is therefore secure and hard to access. I therefore had to look online for reference photos. The best ones of the existing site I found were some incredible aerial photos taken by John D Fielding on Flickr. He kindly allowed me to use some of them as reference images.
Boston United Football Club aerial image - their new Jakemans Community Stadium - Lincolnshire UK

Interior reference of the turbine hall used to model the existing structure was from a promotional video on YouTube called “Take a tour of Sizewell B nuclear power station”.

DOWNLOAD LINK TO FINAL IMAGES:
https://we.tl/t-n1KyWAJABH

Wake Up – 2051 – Final Animation

/5 Comments/in , , , , /by

The idea is to show conversion from our current noisy and busy way of existence to a more relaxed, balanced and connected one.

In 2051 people live together with nature, growing their own foods and 3D printing pies at the same time

Communication takes place through 3D hologram device, deliveries and transportations are powered by drones, which in return are powered by solar and wind energy gathered by the households.

People have finally incorporated daily exercise and mindfulness in their lives and are applying recycled materials wherever possible
(recycled plastic composite, recycled fabrics and wood)

Link to the final animation here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7xoye6eqr30rvmg/Converted_2051.mp4?dl=0

P.S. I could still keep improving and improving the project, but the deadline is here and thank God, cause I think my eyes are in real danger of falling off.
Regardless of the creative process ups and downs, raised anxiety and complications with the substance animation rendering really enjoyed working on the project, learned a lot and most importantly had a lot of fun too! Many thanks to organizers and participants!

Forsaken (final images)

/1 Comment/in , , , , , , , , /by

Forsaken final images (converted challenge project)
High res images:https://we.tl/t-AhTkZkOarW
While I was trying to think about how I’m going to convert my building to something new, I thought about pretty much everything, and I came up with the idea of an actual agricultural centre, as I mentioned before there is no agricultural centre where I live. So I merged this Idea and the new Idea of vertical farming in my building and I used its huge amount of roofed space for providing sunlight for the plants and crops inside. I removed the roof of the building which was made out of concrete and had no structural role in the building and replaced it with a transparent roof. Since this was going to be a research centre I decided to use the environmental spaces as well and planted as much greenery as I could including tea leaves (you can see them in the first image). And looking at some small researches I made on new technologies in agriculture, I noticed that they use drones to control the farms and even use them to spray all over their crops (you can also see the drone, one on top of the building and one airborne)

Making a water flow through the fields was necessary, so I used some tricks on cinema 4d to replicate whatever was in my mind.
The whole complex has two main buildings, one on the side and the other is the main place of research and farming (I used the building attached to the main structure for a small staff office, for disinfection and lockers) the building on the side is dedicated to offices and study labs)
Coming to interior place other than the platforms I made to hold more plants and crops and gain more space, I also designed rounded stands and scattered some grass and greenery on them, you can also see small pools and water flowing in the interior image. I was talking about technology, also added robotic arms to harvest the beans and crops from both high and ground platforms.
Soft wares and plugins I used: Cinema 4d, corona renderer, speed tree, substance source materials, substance designer, substance painter, Forester and real flow.
That was pretty much everything I did in this project I spent so much time on the idea and what I was going to do with my building, and these are the results, I learned a lot during this process including substance suite and etc. it definitely improved me and was quite challenging for me and the most important I met beautiful designers and people in this community, I will share all my projects here in the future.
Best regards
Erfan

Converted | The Foundry

/7 Comments/in , , , /by

My initial idea was the concept of democratized access to sophisticated tools, both hardware and software, which could be easily shared in an open, collaborative workspace by creatives. I thought it matched the main theme rather nicely as one of many examples of how disrupted modern lives are, stuck in a perpetual loop of constant fluctuations, changes and conversions. While I was mainly looking at the context of art and creativity, several associations with industrial revolutions came to mind right away, hence, for the background of the scene I picked an old industrial building, typical for a 19th and 20th century warehouse, factory or foundry. I then filled the space with arrays of little customizable offices and workshops, with robotic arms augmenting artists’ tool- and skill-sets. Such a setup was then fueled with the most valuable resources of current and future times – data. That’s how the data crunching clusters were introduced in the middle of the foundry, as a beating heart that keeps everything in motion. Then, as a juxtaposition and balance to the information cloud packaged in the silicon, I put another totem of power, more tangible, probably more powerful too – a giant old tree, dead in fact and yet still dominant, hovering over modest lounge garden, almost residual. Finally I decided that in this version of the future nature had to be reconstructed and revitalized, rebuilt bit by bit in a chain of biome dioramas which would then return to the original environment and convert it back it its primal state.

For the final output I decided to utilize all the potential of real time graphics, specifically in Unreal Engine 4. I produced a set of still images, an animation, a walkthrough video and a real time experience. Images are presented right below and the remaining content is accessible via provided links. I hope you will all enjoy it.

Animation:

Walkthrough:

Application:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10pvYC09lP2_LtPuTrb5AJlI5RxkOtDSe/view?usp=sharing

DISCLAIMER:
This project was design with Realtime Ray Tracing in mind, therefore a suitable GPU is required to experience it properly. Also, it is strongly recommended to use Nvidia’s DLSS 2.0, which implies using some of the latest Nvidia drivers. It is, however, possible to explore the project without RTX goodness, although the experience will be of lower fidelity and most likely with very low frame rate.
I would suggest sticking to resolutions around 1080p with DLSS set to Quality or 1440p and DLSS set to Performance. If you would like to try it in 4K – definitely go with the ultra DLSS settings.
Expected framerate should be around 30-60 fps.

Converted | The Foundry

/in , , , /by

My initial idea was the concept of democratized access to sophisticated tools, both hardware and software, which could be easily shared in an open, collaborative workspace by creatives. I thought it matched the main theme rather nicely as one of many examples of how disrupted modern lives are, stuck in a perpetual loop of constant fluctuations, changes and conversions. While I was mainly looking at the context of art and creativity, several associations with industrial revolutions came to mind right away, hence, for the background of the scene I picked an old industrial building, typical for a 19th and 20th century warehouse, factory or foundry. I then filled the space with arrays of little customizable offices and workshops, with robotic arms augmenting artists’ tool- and skill-sets. Such a setup was then fueled with the most valuable resources of current and future times – data. That’s how the data crunching clusters were introduced in the middle of the foundry, as a beating heart that keeps everything in motion. Then, as a juxtaposition and balance to the information cloud packaged in the silicon, I put another totem of power, more tangible, probably more powerful too – a giant old tree, dead in fact and yet still dominant, hovering over modest lounge garden, almost residual. Finally I decided that in this version of the future nature had to be reconstructed and revitalized, rebuilt bit by bit in a chain of biome dioramas which would then return to the original environment and convert it back it its primal state.

For the final output I decided to utilize all the potential of real time graphics, specifically in Unreal Engine 4. I produced a set of still images, an animation, a walk-through video and a real time experience. Images are presented right below and the remaining content is accessible via provided links. I hope you will all enjoy it.

Animation:

Walk-through:

Application:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10pvYC09lP2_LtPuTrb5AJlI5RxkOtDSe/view?usp=sharing

DISCLAIMER:
This project was designed with Realtime Ray Tracing in mind, therefore suitable GPU is required to experience it properly. Also, it is strongly recommended to use Nvidia’s DLSS 2.0, which implies using some of the latest Nvidia drivers. It is possible to explore this project without RTX goodness, although the experience will be of lower fidelity and most likely with very low frame rate.
Personally I would suggest sticking to resolutions around 1080p with DLSS set to Quality or 1440p and DLSS set to Performance. If you would like to try it in 4K – definitely go with the Ultra DLSS settings.
Expected framerate should be around 30-60 fps.

“Evanescent”

/0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

For this project, my approach is a bit different than usual. I thought it’ll be more interesting to come up with something “expressionist”,
This gave me more artistic freedom and flow of ideas that are not bounded by any rules and standards.

Instead of conveying an absolute reality (or projected reality), I created something that may not be possible to build in real life. Still somehow architecturally designed, the basic goal is to create images that express a much colorful and solid meaning.

I tried to dig deeper on the word “converted” and come out with the idea of “constant change”, which simply means that any state of everything will soon change to something.

An old farm converted to a church (could be anywhere).

The cloth symbolizes constant movement ( as its shape is dictated by the wind and whatever it covers)
This implies that life is movement and we can only control what will happen as much as we can but nature will still take its course.

The covered trees mean the temporary state of things;

An ugly naked tree can be dressed up and still look majestic.
But it cant be covered forever as the season will soon change and it’ll grow into a much beautiful tree with green leaf and flowers.

The wrapping of trees is inspired by the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude https://christojeanneclaude.net/.
Their work is sometimes not accepted when it’s currently installed but it’ll look majestic and beautiful now looking at the photos and prints.
Those art installations are examples of what I’m trying to convey, that no matter how good or bad things are, they’re all just temporary.
That we all have a choice to keep the good memory and leave the bad ones behind.

The structure resembles a church with no altar;

Aside from being open and free, this symbolizes hope and fate, that as though we know that everything won’t last, were always promised a new tomorrow is coming.
It may or may not be the same as what we have today but we rely on our faith to be positive that it’ll be a better one.

Those dandelions in the field symbolize hope( we usually blow on its flower and make a wish)

The olive tree in the middle symbolizes peace and prosperity which we all desire( feel free to google it 🙂

Overall, I tried to somehow give a positive vibe to everyone suffering or on the bad side of what’s going on around the world.
That no matter how crazy things are right now… these all shall pass 🙂

Hires available here; https://we.tl/t-9afuZccu0x