Visualise lighting in d3

17 November 2011

Frustrated by the labour-intensive process for visualising installations, design practice UVA developed its own software. Amanda Allen talks to the practice about d3, an integrated production tool

London-based United Visual Artists describes itself as a design practice at the intersection of art and architecture and, to aid the fusion of these two diverse diciplines, the practice has developed d3, an integrated production tool for sculptural media installations, which is now available to design practices globally.

The system is built around a real-time 3D stage visualiser, which allows designers to import venues, screens or other objects as 3D models and then simulate the visual appearance of the object and view the scene in real time from any position. “Content can be mapped using parallel, cylindrical or radial geometric maps and moved, stretched and rotated in real time as necessary,” explains David Bajt, lead d3 projects developer at United Visual Artists. “It means that designers no longer need to take the position of the physical projector into account or have to deal with image warping for 3D shapes. In d3 you just make the content, tell d3 the measurements of the 3D screen and it creates the effect.”

A recent project created by United Visual Artists with the help of d3 was Slipstream – a 135m-long light sculpture created for Toronto’s Eaton Centre, a shopping and office complex. Inspired by the great length and depth of the centre’s galleria and its glass vault, Slipstream is designed to suggest a connection to the sky and the natural light coming from above.

“We wanted to maintain the exiting connection with the outside, so we started by looking at the changes in the sky and the motion outside. We used that as a starting point and went about creating a piece with a single gesture of movement in it,” says UVA’s Ben Kreukniet.

The sculpture itself comprises 70 prisms, each suspended along the axis of the galleria. Tensegrity wires hold the sculpture in place with their orientation echoing and extending the geometry of the prisms themselves. Each successive prism is rotated by one degree to create the ‘single gesture of movement’.

In this instance, the design team used d3 as both a design and presentation tool and also to run shows on the completed sculpture. “We used d3 a lot when we were developing the idea to evaluate the concepts and to make sure that the idea could be implemented in the way that we wanted,” explains Kreukniet. “It gave us a good sense of scale and colour and what the rotation would be like. It helped us to make those kinds of decisions but it also allowed us to show the client what the finished product would be.”

Fashion show

Creative production agency Drive Productions used d3 to create two large-scale building projections to mark the launch of Ralph Lauren’s e-commerce site in the UK. The fashion company wanted to stage the building projections at its flagship stores in New York and London to mark the event.

“The Ralph Lauren project is one which is a mixture of installation and an architectural application,” say Bajt. “It was all about playing with textures and light and music. It was like working with two different worlds, because there is this beautiful old building which [we] had to merge with sound and light. That’s one of the very creative things about how d3 works.”

The d3 system was used to map real product footage and real models onto the four-storey buildings. The show featured 3D replicas of some of the brand’s most iconic images, such as galloping polo players and catwalk models.

“It made the Ralph Lauren logo pop out, giving it a kind of 3D quality,” says Bajt. “And all of this could be visualised on the system as it was being created, and tweaked as necessary.”