Holographic Introduction

This is the first project I will be posting on which will hopefully become a habit and motivator of sorts. I've started work on the holographic representation of Downtown Los Angeles. It is to be tracked and incorporated in a 2/3 minute short I plan on shooting. Right now however I'm focusing on getting the main assets done. 

Initially the idea was to generate all the buildings from a set of solids. This however was quickly discarded for a more stylistic and efficient approach by generating geometry based on particle hight. This offered up a range of new possibilities for when it came to animating the hologram as well as give it some nice depth characteristics. A problem you run into with that, is when you're displacing particles in their base z-space with a depth map. The alpha range is hard to control over a spectrum of a building with only one floor to a downtown building with 50+ floors. If you want a nice resolution to work with you end up having to create independent depth maps for different geometry. As such I've created 3 independent maps for 3 different heights and layered those on top of each other in the final comp.

Thus far I have established the streets, highway and parking lots completely. I'm slowly generating more buildings along the edges and working my way to the center. A good chunk of the center piece skyline has also been completed and the grid is filling up nicely as you can see on the right here.

While I have started work on the initialization and boot up sequence, I have yet to come up with a clean and intuitive UI that is to be used in the short. I've been toying with the video of having holographic 3D track pad or two at the edge of the table. Or something like a holographic keyboard. I simply just don't want to resort to some kind unpractical yet strangely accurate hand gesture interface without a sensor in sight.

From a shooting standpoint I want to create a set of props and scout for a location which is something I'm hoping to do sometime in the next few days. I have some idea's as to what kind of setting I want but as of this moment I'm very open minded based on some of the locations that I can find. If a suitable location is found and it is possible I want to try and actually create a table for this to be tracked on. I might however have to scrap that if I come up short.

 

I have included a rough "initialization and boot-up" sequence along with a slight camera pan to show of what I currently have done. It is hard to say but one can assume that as of yet the map is only about 40% populated. I'm hoping to update and add to this daily and hopefully all the digital assets of this project will be done over the weekend.

For now however, it is time to call it a day.
-Niotex