Go team go!

Welcome to the Team W.A.A.R.T blog. Team W.A.A.R.T is a crack team of talented individual who produce professional and high quality animations and models. Our aim is to be the best of the best. And we do it all whilst being damn attractive and charming too.

Team W.A.A.R.T's current project is documenting the construction of the very building we study in: Ravensbourne College on the Greenwich Peninsula. It looks like this:


Pretty sweet basically. And I think it's something we can reproduce faithfully fairly easily. Of course just modeling this building isn't enough. As I said, we're documenting it's construction in computer animation form, so we'll be showing it from foundations to finish. And yes, that is alliteration I just used there.

So step one was track down the time lapse footage that was made of the construction. Useful stuff, that, we can use it for direct reference. Turns out management had forgotten to get that off the people they paid. Good job guys.

Lucky we were there to remind them, gosh we think of everything don't we? So with that in hand we can get started properly! I would put it up oh here, but I'm not sure we're allowed... More on that later!

The plan is to have a fluid moving camera through a static environment that periodically changes to reflect the passing of time, so after a good look at the foundations, for example, we then jump ahead to the cranes bringing in the building's skeleton.

With that in mind we've got to get someone to do a storyboard so we can figure out what's going to be on camera most and then prioritize what to model and when. Until the Storyboard is finished people can get to work on the things that will definitely feature prominently, like the scissor lifts that tile the building and the shipping crates that feature in the early construction. Also needed is a basic model to represent workers, so we can show how their work habits change depending on the weather and time of year.

Oh, and that's a point: Need to think about how weather will affect things like lighting and activity. I found some examples of weather in time lapse, see it here:



So as you can see when it's raining there's an increase in traffic but a bit of a decrease in work speed. During the construction of Ravensbourne there is rain, fog and snow to deal with. Work continued but not at the same rate. When it rains the ambient colour becomes much drearier, and washed out whereas during the snow the effect is everything seems much brighter.

Interesting... So anyway, on with the work!

Team W.A.A.R.T go!