Blue Sun World

Sphynx, you once told me about architectural visualisation contract that was based upon the designs of others, but in which you still needed to use a large amount of artistic license. Will you tell us about it - who were Blue Sun World?

"Hmm, Blue Sun World were, and actually still are, an estate agency company here in the UK (what people in the US would call real-estate) which dealt primarily with new properties to be built principally in Spain. Blue Sun World had some very big ideas, and put a great deal of financial input into both their underlying concept and their place of business."

Yes, you have told me about that before - what was it like?

"The imagination zone was a section of their building in Maidstone that was dedicated to giving potential buyers a taste of the experience of living in Spain. While it contained a range of things that added to that flavour, technically it had some interesting features in itself. The area was surrounded by a flowing digital-glass wall that could be made to opaque before your eyes and onto which images could be projected - the default being flowing water-falls of colour to hide the contents of the Zone itself until the tour was ready to proceed.

"At the very centre of the Zone was a large, maybe 8' by 12' model of their principle site - a community in Spain which contained not only a residential district but also shopping malls, sports centres, schools and even an equestrian centre. That however, was where their problem principally lay."

Oh, in what way? It sounds like a great place.

"The idea itself was wonderful, but as with many projects in Spain it tends to get ahead of itself - they had this large centre-piece model and a few concept models of property types, but that was pretty much it. Other that some initial artistic impressions of individual properties and architectural drawings, they had been given very little material by the developer that they could use to actually go to market and sell properties."

 

So it was all off-plan selling - I can see the problem. I take it that this is where you came in?

"That's right - we took the basic architectural drawings, which were still very fluid in the first place - and extended them into 3D space. Populating the properties with some very basic furniture, we put together a first-stage set of renders and animations for approval with the idea of taking them to something more photo-realistic a little later. In actual fact, they were so impressed with the first-stage renders (considering what little they actually had in the first instance) and ran with it. The renders made their hand-out brochures, and the animations even made display on the big-screen at Twickenham [rugby grounds] - at the time, they were sponsoring sponsoring London Irish [rugby team] and Charlton Athletic [soccer team].

So you were even going to go further? To photo-realistic animations?

"That was the idea, but in the meantime other requirements stepped in first - one was a full fly-by of the site as a whole - quite a major undertaking as there were something like 18,000 properties on the development. We would have been essentially duplicating the centre-piece model in CG - it would have given them a great deal of scope for changing aspects of the development - with everything still being fluid, some aspects of the development were naturally changing on a daily basis. We got a large section done for displaying one property type before we halted."

I was hearing the word 'would' quite a bit in there. It take it that the project never quite happened?

"No - luckily we operate a staged payment system, so neither they nor ourselves ended up out of pocket. It's a bit of shame really, and no fault of Blue Sun itself. Unfortunately, a company with a major interest in BSW at the time was Llanera S.A, a major Spanish building firm operating out of Valencia - they were a big victim of the Spanish property crash even before the upheaval in the financial markets hit the world. With a major stakeholder in both BSW and the underlying principle development in receivership everything suddenly had the brakes put on - BSW were in limbo for quite a while, not knowing what they could and could not do under the Llanera's [Spanish] version of receivership. It wasn't their fault and they were as much a victim as anyone, but I'm glad to say that they are still around even today with other developments ongoing."

Do you still take on architectural visualisation and building design?

"Yes, but in the current market place it's usually not for large development. The big architecture firms deal with most of the big projects - those that are happening that is. We do however, undertake private commissions - especially for the dream-home self-building community who want to see what their building is going to look like before they commit to spending a few hundred thousand pounds (and usually far more)."

Thanks for talking to us Sphynx.