Magical Reflections
« Magical Reflections » is a unique cultural WebXR project made with Makemepulse and Meta for Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin. A virtual gallery alongside a real life exhibition featuring Johann Erdmann Hummel’s work, with a focus on one of his most iconic, ‘The Granite Bowl in the Berlin Lustgarten’. A way to highlight classical art in the middle of a dreamed and surreal environment.
I truly enjoyed crafted this one as a 3D Art Director / Motion Designer and I’m happy to share my work as well as some juicy details on the 3d breakdown.
3D Styleframes
Behind The Scene
Designing the space
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Our vision of the museum was to create large dreamy rooms mixing modern and traditional architecture in a minimalistic environnement. In this surreal journey, we wanted to feel weightless: the stairs are disconnected on purpose, the seats are floating, the whole museum is levitating in the sky.
Painting with lights, shadows and caustics
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In order to add some depth, visual interest and to contribute to the dreamlike mood of the museum, I also used caustic textures as gobos to paint the architectural space with about 50 lights placed strategically to highlight the different paintings and all the angles of the museum.
Materials and Reflections
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One of the ways to design the idea of magical reflections in real-time aside from a fully PBR workflow was to create a matcap which allowed me to add colorful reflections within a very small texture. Most of the other assets were created using Substance Painter while the floor was made with real time reflections.
Camera Walkthrough Animation
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The project has to be accessible in VR through the browser using Oculus Quest 2 and WebXR. This realtime virtual experience allows us to move freely in the space and look everywhere around us, as well as scrolling up and down to explore the museum and the different art pieces which leads into one emblematic painting from the artist. I created a camera rig that moves as smoothly as possible to each paintings. The full camera walkthrough animation was baked to be handled interactivly by the user.
Baking time using Houdini
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Since the museum relies a lot on lightmap, we decided to use the powerful features of Houdini 🧙. The software uses a non destructive workflow to generate on the fly lightmap uv with good texel density scattering, which is great for quick iterations. And since it’s node based, it enables other things like cleanup the scene, place custumizable frames, and many other tweaks, all at once.
The 3d scene was fully created in Cinema 4D using Redshift render regarding the art direction, then imported inside Houdini using the same setup with all the complex lighting in order to use its powerful features for packing and backing the uv set.
(below some examples of the lighting setup and baked textures for the museum)
⟶ More info on the technical breakdown here.
Team
Client — Meta
Creative Studio — makemepulse
Anthony Méric: 3D Art Direction/Design — Animation
Romain Passelande: Art Direction — Design
Thomas Rousset: Art Direction — Design
Agathe Girard: 3D Artist
Pierre Lepers: Webgl — Creative Developer
Florentin Monteil: Webgl — Creative Developer
Julien Vasseur: Frontend Developer
Rémi Becuwe: Developer
Emmanuel Durgoni: Senior Frontend Developer
Christophe Massolin: Creative Developer
Press Play On Tape: Sound Design
Juliette Desbois: Producing