This project was for the live unveiling of a new helicopter from Bell Helicopter. I wasn’t hired by Bell directly, I worked with Steam, a Santa Monica based visual production studio.

This project was the first one that I worked on that was used as a room-sized projection! I rendered at 8000x1080 for a super wide-angle camera. In fact, it was so wide angle that I had to use a special cylindrical projection camera to grab the 270° field of view.

Alpine Scene

The 3D terrains here were purchased and then tweaked specifically for our needs. I also made custom water and atmosphere shaders to really bring out the depth and nature of the scenes.

Canyon Scene

The canyon’s textures are actually heavily modified, as the ones that came with the model were green and luscious, so I adjusted them to have that classic red-rock look that many deserts and canyons have.

City Scene

The city scene was a bit different. I ended up using motionless particles to create a huge spawling array of buildings with various properties. The hero buildings were purchased and places in important parts of the scene and were given special attention to detail.

I also created custom window textures including normal maps that make the surface warped just subtly enough to give that subtle rippled look that skyscraper windows have.