The Norwegian Wild Reindeer Centre Pavilion is located at Hjerkinn on the outskirts of Dovrefjell National Park, home to Europe’s last wild reindeer herds and the natural habitat for many rare plants and animals. The 90 m² building is open to the public and serves as an observation pavilion for the Wild Reindeer Foundation educational programmes.
The building was designed by Snøhetta, an architecture and design office based in Oslo, Norway and New York City. Snøhetta describes the design as being based on a contrast between ideas - a rigid outer shell and a soft, organic inner core. The wooden core is shaped like rock or ice that has been eroded by natural forces like wind and running water, and is placed within a rectangular frame of raw steel and glass.
“WOW!” My first reaction to the great render, beautiful design, and that you would create a pavillion just for wild reindeer
(to watch the humans?)…with a nice modern stove to warm their hooves.
Thank you all so much for the comments - I’m very new to this kind of architectural visualisation so they’ve definitely given me the confidence to keep going with it.
mdj and ejnaren - both the process of modelling and the material setups used are needlessly complicated in this case but I’d be more than happy to explain any parts in particular if you’re interested.
The wooden interior was sculpted to match reference images and then used to shape a solid stack of wooden beams using the boolean modifier. Beams close to the camera were then retopologised to boost the quality of the most visible sections. Cracks in the wood are applied using hand-drawn textures mapped on top of the wood ones, and a carved-out effect was applied to the ceiling beams using a wave texture as a bump map (I used vertex painting to mask it out which let me paint the areas to receive the effect). The scene is lit by a large emitting plane covering the window area, which was set to render as transparent so the background could be added easily. A separate pass was rendered with the windows totally reflecting the inside, and this was added in GIMP (using the ‘screen’ mode) to create the reflections of the interior in the glass.
If there’s anything else you’d like to know please ask.
