Print / Financial Times ‘Glass City’

Working with large quantities of glass is always a technical challenge. colour, transparency, reflection, refraction plus many other characteristics that give glass its appearance, all need  to be controllable whilst retaining their realism.

We collaborated closely with the art directors from RAPP to improve and streamline the composition of the layouts, The exterior of every building needed to be made from glass (but discreetly) enabling the viewer to see clearly into every office, boardroom and cubicle to reveal business people going about their work and the furnishings that make up that environment. We needed to carefully consider the balance of internal (office) lighting against exterior lighting (the sun and it’s position relative to the buildings). We can also take exacting control of the glass that covers the buildings, to ensure clarity, controlling the glass’s tint and the levels of reflection.

With the buildings so tightly packed and standing in front of one other, the job of rendering all the refractions and reflections was no easy feat. Usually on a job this large the renders would be split up to allow for a more flexible rebuild. However, due to the complex level of refractions this was proving to be very difficult. In the end we conceived a method of using transparency alphas which allowed us to break the render up whilst maintaining the visual of the original file.

By splitting the file up like this it meant our retouch department had the flexibility to alter certain elements of the image for the clients without having to go through more days of rendering. This kind of process really allows us to maximise efficiency in dealing with last minute comments, it taking a couple of hours to fix things in photoshop as opposed to a couple of days to fix and re-render in 3DS MAX.