Create New York’s IRT Powerhouse
Simon Edwards takes us through his process of producing a detailed CG depiction of a former functioning power station
Simon Edwards details how he created this detailed CG building
The IRT Powerhouse (Interborough Rapid Transit) was built at the beginning of the 20th Century to power the New York subway system, which was then being built in Manhattan. It was designed in the form of a classic temple to pay homage to the powerful growth in industry of that time and still stands at West 59th Street. In 2017 the building was designated a New York Landmark.
The station no longer provides power to the subway, but since the 1950s it has been occupied by Consolidated Edison who use it to supply steam around New York
City to heat buildings, provide humidity control and steam cleaning. All the original chimneys and the roof have long since been removed and a large blocky extension was added to the riverside elevation in the 1940s.
My intention was to illustrate how this building was designed to produce electricity using a battery of giant turbines driven from the steam generated from vast quantities of coal. This was a time when technology was monumental, heavy, noisy and extremely dirty. In my mind I had a vision of steampunk on a monumental scale.
There was a lot of interesting research to do in studying plans and photographs, learning how materials were moved in, out and around the building and how everything worked together. The location of the building was key as the Hudson river provided water for the boilers and coal and ashes were delivered and removed by river barges.
01 SCENE SETUP
My aim was to illustrate the entire structure set within its surroundings while focusing in on small details inside the two grand hall spaces. The building is extremely long and I wanted to avoid a long, thin image aspect. Plus, I was keen to emphasise the grandeur and scale of the tall internal structure. This all pointed towards using camera distortion, which would enable me to position a camera close up to the structure while allowing the view to stretch to both extremities of the building and beyond.
02 COMPOSITION
To achieve the right composition I used a small amount of distortion in the Vrayphysicalcamera settings, along with changing the camera type setting in the Render dialog to a spherical panorama camera.
When using a spherical panorama camera selected from the Render dialog, the final scene render is not visible in the active camera viewport. To correctly fix the scene composition I first had to create a simple dummy polygon block referencing the final building and scene masses. With this I could then quickly run test renders and was able to tweak the camera FOV settings until the right composition was achieved.
03 ORGANISING THE MODEL: PART 1
When building such a busy scene, modelling can quickly become unnavigable. This means that careful organisation and planning should be considered at an early stage. It may become impossible to single out an object when there are too many elements visible on screen, and furthermore some heavily meshed objects can slow the navigation down just by being visible. I make sure to use layers and the Isolation button in 3ds Max to keep things in order and under control.
By bundling items into layers, specific work areas can be isolated while others are hidden or frozen. Editing can become easier just by hiding layers from view that contain heavily meshed objects.
04 ORGANISING THE MODEL: PART 2
To reduce demand on the computer further I used Xref Scenes to remove large chunks of modelling from the main model and reference them back again into the scene at a later stage.
This included most of the heavily meshed objects such as the human figures, all of the vehicles, the coal piles and all of the simulated liquids and gasses in the scene. Simulations include fire in the furnaces, water inside the underground culvert pipelines and smoke inside and outside of the six chimneys.
05 SIMULATIONS
The Phoenix FD plugin from Chaos Group was used to create the simulations. To start I built simplified versions of the pipes and culverts in the main model with non-renderable, single-sided polygon objects. This ensures a simulation will not spend unnecessary time calculating around small modelled objects which may otherwise lie in the path of its particle flow.
The sequence was run over a duration of 680 frames in order for both the smoke and water to travel a required distance away from their source points.
Once complete the file was referenced back into the main model using Xref Scenes.
06 FIRE AS A LIGHT SOURCE
I wanted to give the impression of heat coming from the open furnaces. This was done by multiplying the light output generated from the fire simulation.
In the Phoenix simulation rendering parameters there is a button named Volumetric Options. Once pressed, it opens a new dialog box inside which, underneath the Fire tab, by default has the Create Fire Lights option ticked on. Additional parameters allow for me to raise the ‘Light Power on Scene’, which I increased from 1 to 10.
Be sure not to have the Ignore Lights option ticked when this simulation is referenced back into the main model.
07 PARTICLE ARRAYS
The coal in the bunkers was moved out of the main model to free more memory. These coal piles were built using particle arrays with the instanced geometry taken from a simple polygon cluster of nine coal blocks.
This instanced geometry, with its material, is copied 15,000 times over a simple, singlesided and invisible emitter surface. Additionally a ‘Super Spray’ particle emitter instanced geometry from a single coal block to simulate coal falling into the pile from the conveyor belt above.
Once again this file was referenced back into the main model using Xref Scenes.
08 V-RAY CLIPPERS
In total, the scene contains 12 V-ray Clippers which chop out sections of wall, steelwork, floors, chimneys and other items. All the clippers are grouped into a single layer so they may be quickly hidden from the viewport. Be aware, in order to render the scene correctly clippers must be visible in the viewport, even if Render Hidden Objects has been selected.
Pre-built cutting blocks are created to chop through the modelling and are then attached to clippers by using the Mesh mode setting. By clicking the clipper Exclude button a list of objects can be selected for inclusion by the clipper. Having previously created selection sets of these items makes the inclusion easier and quicker.
09 VRAYDISTANCETEX
Many of the stains and dirt smears seen on the surfaces have been created by using Vraydistancetex. This is a procedural texture from V-ray that creates a different colour or texture based on the distance it is away from a specified object. The objects used to create these effects are largely hidden from the scene by making them nonrenderable. Once again, as there are many objects of this kind, they are bundled into a single layer which can quickly be hidden in order to clear the viewport of subsidiary objects. •