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ZEN and the Art of Visualization

Jonathan Muller

A young company in Melbourne, Australia has some forward-thinking ideas about digital visualization for architecture and the construction industry.

It was only last year that the two founders of ZEN Multimedia got together to meditate on the future of their business aspirations. Architect Courtney Sung and Swinburne University multimedia graduate Justin Arthur decided that a 100% digital approach to construction industry visualization would give them the edge over the conventional-media artists who still produce a significant percentage of ‘artist’s impression’ images for proposed developments. In the last six months they have defined what they see as the future of visualization presentations: CD- and web-based productions that incorporate all aspects of the project, unified within a slick, interactive interface.

A contributing factor to the success of Zen’s approach is the speed with which the company can turn out a product; two weeks from initial client agreement and briefing to the finished multimedia CD incorporating animated walkthroughs of a 3D model, interactive panoramas and still-image renderings is not hanging around.

A recent project for client Phileo Australia illustrates ZEN’s approach. The original requirement was for a glossy marketing brochure, on which ZEN worked with the client’s graphic design consultancy. The interactive CD was initially seen as a supporting medium to the traditional print brochure. In the event, the CD component became the core of the project and the glossy print brochure came to take a supporting role. 200 copies of the finished promotional CD were in the client’s hands in two weeks, whereas production of the brochure took a further four weeks.

Planning, then panning

After the initial client briefing, a typical project for ZEN involves a ‘brainstorming’ session conducted at the whiteboard, where the broad issues of format, timeframe and style are worked through, while also addressing any potential production issues. In the case of the Phileo project, both the brochure and CD interface design and layout were conceived on the whiteboard.

In an age of instantaneous electronic data transfer, it is the traditional industries that can sometimes hold up a project. In ZEN’s case it was the printing of the CD covers. Printing plates took four working days to produce and, although the artwork was supplied with a week to spare for printing, a last-minute change to the layout, initiated by the client, caused a minor panic.

Simultaneously with the planning activity, the 3D model is generally built from supplied 2D AutoCAD drawings or plan prints or is modified from a supplied 3D digital model. This last point requires some explanation.

While the ideal of the perfectly reusable 3D digital model, produced in CAD and emailed to the visualization consultants, may be a good one, in practice it is rarely the modus operandi.

Visualization consultancies often have to strip out excess entities from in-house produced work and, in some cases, to rebuild much of them in order to have efficient, workable, fast-rendering models. This is often unavoidable, as the model is usually not constructed and organized with a specific use or rendering package in mind. For instance, layer naming conventions that make sense in an AutoCAD 2D drafted drawing are of little use in a 3D rendering environment, where the governing organizer is material map application, not object or service type.

Similarly, the humble line entity is fine for 2D drawings but a nuisance in 3D, where polylines are generally more manageable and effective (take instant capping of closed polyline outlines in 3D Studio VIZ and MAX as an example).

ZEN usually takes supplied 3D models and uses them as a basis or ‘skeleton’ over which it builds its own version for export to Discreet 3D Studio VIZ R3.0. Many packages were tried before settling on VIZ but ZEN says it is the only package which will import DWG and DXF files with accuracy as high as 95%. Since the AutoCAD DWG format is the defacto file standard in architecture and construction, VIZ’ maintenance of imported AutoCAD layer properties and the ability to convert back to AutoCAD DWG format easily was considered important.

In the case of the Phileo project, the building model was of such complexity that the initial polygon count was around ten million! This figure had to be reduced and ZEN’s strategy was to delete the core of the building for all scenes that did not allow a view directly inside. Polygon trees in the scene were another polygon ‘bloat’ culprit, so these were subjected to the Optimize modifier to cut them back to basics. After ‘pruning’ the final polygon count was approximately six million.

Carefully planning views at the outset can drastically reduce the amount of geometry that needs to be modeled and, with a model of this complexity, it was crucial. To reduce the complexity of its modeled trees ZEN has, since this project, started using ARCHvision’s REAL TREES which are two-polygon vertical planes with view-dependent photographic tree images mapped onto them according to the horizontal location of the camera.

While view establishment, lighting and rendering took place, a physical mockup of the brochure was constructed for client approval. Following completion of the interface planning, the presentation was then authored in Macromedia Director, using its LINGO scripting language. Director is used because ZEN considers it to be user friendly and Justin has familiarity with the package from his college days.

ZEN uses QuickTime for fixed animation, while iMove’s Smoothmove panorama viewer (as a Director ActiveX plugin) produces panoramas. ZEN believes the 360° iMove panoramas are among the best interactive content vehicles available, seeing great possibilities for it with future development towards online broadcasting. High-resolution panoramas can already easily be emailed to clients, who only need to install the free viewer.

After completing animation renderings in VIZ, they are taken into Adobe Premiere in order to find a suitable compression codec. The QuickTime format is an interesting choice (rather than AVI animation), considering that the bulk of ZEN’s clients use a version of Windows as their desktop operating system.

Since the animation was produced in Microsoft Media Viewer format, you might think one codec would work for all flavors of Windows. Not so, according to ZEN, who found that Windows 95, 98, NT and 2000 all have different requirements. After much experimentation, a single codec was found that played across all platforms, including the MacOS operating system.

VIZ image of a project by Victorian Investments & Properties Pty Ltd.

ZEN is keen to exploit the Web as the primary means of project delivery, however the usual problems of bandwidth capacity places limitations on this ideal at present. Macromedia Flash 4 is ZEN’s preferred vehicle for presenting online projects, since its vector-based graphics allow smoother, faster downloading.

Currently all ZEN’s web material is authored in Director and delivered in Shockwave format. This largely avoids issues of plugin installation, since both Shockwave and Flash viewers are included with the latest versions of the major browsers.

Steps for growth

Courtney Sung is mindful of the reliance that architects and their promotional consultants have on the boom-and-bust cycles of the construction and development industry.

Malaysia and Singapore have been targeted by ZEN Multimedia as the next big markets for the construction industry, where things move fast and require quick reactions from consultants. ZEN intends to offer clients a "total package" including marketing, animations, advertisements and computer hardware to run exhibitions. In development is custom-designed software specifically for the construction industry.

This young company sees the world as its oyster and the Web as its link to global clients.

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