Hi everyone,
Zamora 129 is the third short film that I’ve created with Blender, and it’s been both the toughest to complete and the film I’m most proud of to date. The subject of the film is Zamora 129, an environmentally friendly apartment building that I designed on an empty plot of land in Mexico City that I found using Google Street View. I won’t go into the architecture in too much detail, but if you want to read more about it you can visit my website: http://rowanibbeken.co.uk/zamora-129-mexico-city-mexico/
The film presented several challenges, the two biggest of which were recreating the surrounding buildings and realisticaly animating all the different plants and trees in the scene. For the former, since I could not travel to Mexico City to make my own footage to motion track the building into (or make photogrammetry scans of any of the buildings) I instead recreated a whole section of the street in Blender. For the latter, I employed Houdini, as I have for the VFX in my previous two films. Using Houdini, I developed of method of rigging and animating each plant and tree species, with particular focus on replicating the erratic, high frequency motion of the leaves due to constant changes in the wind. Once animated, I then imported the plants back into Blender as alembic files.
The scene was modelled and rendered with Blender, cloth modelling was done in Marvelous Designer, VFX and some modelling work in Houdini and color grading & sound design in Da Vinci Resolve. All interior design and architecture by Rowan Ibbeken.
If you want to check out more of my work, take a look at my instagram @rowanibbekendesign or my website: rowanibbeken.co.uk
Thanks for looking!
Rowan
