44,000 surfaces in Alias StudioTools

Protograph were commissioned by Bombardier to bring to life their new design for a London Underground train. This included the interior and exterior. They required a range of hi-res still images and an animation mainly focusing of flying through the interior which consisted of 3 different carriage layouts.

Bombardier were looking for a visualisation business that could handle the very large nurbs data set they had produced within Alias StudioTools, containing over 44,000 individual nurbs surfaces for the interior 3 carriages alone.

Many visualisation businesses would need to go through a conversion process to get this data into their visualisation software, but Protograph use Maya as a front end to their Renderdrive render farm. Maya can directly import StudioTools files and maintain the materials already assigned to the geometry. This reduced the time taken to replace them with our own photo real materials for the Renderdrives.

Maya is very efficient at handling nurbs and we keep design data in this format throughout the whole rendering process. The ARTVPS Renderdrives handle this data better than any render system we have come across so far. This enables us to more easily import design modifications at later stages, which happened on this job.

The project progressed on time and to budget and Bombardier were very pleased with the final results, infact they exceeded their expectations. We have now completed 3 major projects with Bombardier over the last 2 years.

The final video and selected stills can be seen in our folio pages.