Creating the Building

The first challenge was to model the building with the right proportions. At that time I didn’t know exactly how things would go, maybe I would destroy the entire building or maybe just a few parts of it so I had to model everything in a proper manner to eventually destroy every part later.

Every time I needed information such as the size, I could look out of my window to easily get it. In real production, you have to gather every piece of information that you can before going into modeling.

The main building was quite straight forward to model but the things which really took time were those little details such as signs, props on the balconies, props inside stores, etc. This is where Houdini came really handy! It turned out very useful when I needed to add a lot of different props such as shutters, curtains and all kind of elements that you can find on a balcony in a random way to make it look less computer-generated. I did a little setup to scatter those elements with different positions for each apartment. Those little details really help to sell the shot.