Al Raha Gardens
2005: twelve villas built entirely in 3D for ALDAR, rendered as 360° stills and 360° video, without a single GPU.
In 2005 ALDAR was launching Al Raha Gardens in Abu Dhabi and wanted buyers to walk through villas that did not exist yet. So everything had to be built in 3D: twelve villa layouts furnished room by room, their gardens, the streets, the school, the security gate, the park.
And it all had to be seen in 360°, not only as still images but as video. You look around a room, then you glide to the next one, and you can still look anywhere while you move. It was a precursor of what 360° video is today, rendered at a time when nobody had a GPU to help. I loved this project.
The twelve villa layouts, each one modelled, furnished and landscaped in 3D.
villa layouts
360° room views
walkthroughs in 360° video
rendered 360° frames
Still images, with 360° video in between
The tour worked like this. Every room had its own 360° still, A, B, C and so on. Between two rooms we rendered a 360° video, in both directions: A.jpg, B.jpg, then AB to walk from A to B, and BA to walk back. The viewer looked around a still, chose the next room, and the house moved around them.
It was the same technique used for the DVD extras of Van Helsing, one of the first anywhere to use 360° video on a DVD, and on the discs of big titles of that time like Harry Potter, Driven, The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. We did it for a real-estate development, entirely in 3D.
Try it below with villa 06: drag to look around, then pick a room. Living room to dining room, and master bedroom to bathroom, play the original transitions, 300 rendered frames each. The garden walkthrough is the full exterior sequence.
Original renders from 2005, 2048×1024 for the stills and 1024×512 for the video, shown in a modern 360° player.
A render farm between France and Dubai
When I came to Dubai, I started working with Photint, a local UAE company. Photint was a spin-off of iPIX International, itself a spin-off of iPIX, the Internet Pictures Corporation. Being able to bring my own technology and my team in Bordeaux to a project like this one was a gem, and I am still very proud of it.
At Doo Interactive we had a team of 3D artists, organised by speciality: some built the furniture, some built the villas from the floor plans, and an integration team put rooms, gardens and streets together. The team in France also prepared the lighting for every scene.
I was in Dubai, where I ran the rendering locally on Xeon computers, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. France sent me the scenes with their lighting solutions, I rendered them frame by frame, and the frame sequences went back to France to be edited into the 360° videos.
Everything was computed on processors, without any GPU, so everything had to be optimised. An interior frame took about twenty seconds, an exterior with all its plants more than a minute. Interiors were the best handled. There was no time for raytracing, and the deadline kept the video at 1024×512.
Every frame had its place
With twelve houses rendered on several machines, the naming was the workflow. Each house had a number from 01 to 12, each room a letter. _01_AB-300 meant house 01, from room A to room B, 300 frames. Every move was rendered both ways. The shot list, with the camera position of every view on the plans, was approved by the client on 2 September 2005. The renders ran through October and the disc was built in November.
Actors in a 3D neighbourhood
Beyond the villas, ALDAR needed a film of the whole community. We built the estate in 3D, with its streets, gate, school, park and tennis courts, and filmed actors on a blue screen so they could walk through it. Motion capture of the actors gave the master shoot its families and residents.
One disc, twelve villas
Everything came together in a Macromedia Director interface. For each villa: a 3D plan of every floor, the 360° room views, the animated walkthroughs, the exteriors, and a fly-through of the estate. One file per villa, one main menu, 98 room views and 37 walkthroughs in all.
Every frame, one at a time
Today a game engine renders a 360° room in real time on a graphics card, and 360° video plays on any phone. In 2005 we computed 28,416 frames of 360° video one by one, on processors, between two countries, against a deadline.
The idea was the same as today: let people walk through a place before it exists, and look wherever they want.
Produced by Doo Interactive for ALDAR, Al Raha Gardens, Abu Dhabi, 2005.
3D modelling, lighting and video editing: the Doo Interactive team of 3D artists, video editors and multimedia producers.
Rendering, production and interface: Stéphane Jacob, in Dubai, with Photint (UAE).
Sources: Doo Interactive project files, 2005: 3ds Max scenes, render sequences, shot list and the final disc.