The site for the Predator X11 was created using wordpress to enable the client to content manage the site. The Team Xtreme guys can add new news stories and race reports easily to the site without getting involved in any coding. The styling is applied automatically to the new pages and everything is kept nicely organised and up to date. In addition team drivers can add to their own ‘blog’ and post specific info and setups for their Predator X11 cars.

A few of the ‘action’ pictures were kindly supplied by oOple and the legendary Jummy Storey. The other pictures of the car, taken for the spec pages were photographed using a light dome tent and photographic lights in my garage !

Hopefully the site will help promote Team Xtreme and their Predator X11 car both in the Uk and abroad.

The designs were very well received and adapted to accommodate the actual content for the site as it was fed through, along with functional requirements from the client.

A lot of time and thought went into the early designs as thay had to stand up both visually and functionally and show clear journeys through the site with key outcomes. It always helps to work to research and understand a customers requirements with a large project such as this, as the client generally can’t visualize how their content will work online and how key calls to action will work across different pages.
Needless to say, the work that went into these original designs was invaluable in helping the client visualize how the site would progress. The finished site can be found here.
World Trade Center Hull

Below is the little orange speaker you can see in the apartment visuals, this gives you some idea of how much detail is needed to produce something like the apartment visual as a whole. Almost everything in the apartment visual was modeled from scratch !

Everything was designed and modeled in 3d Studio Max, I then animated a series of camera paths through the scene to create a set of animations we could export as flv files for use in flash. My old friend, the trusty Vray rendering engine was used inside Max to render out the scenes, this involved pre rendering and calculation of the lighting solution, so that the global illumination in the scene did not flicker as the lighting is calculated on a per frame basis. If you are in any way interested in Vray, then head over to Vray’s web site.

This is one of the many animations I created for the site navigation. Click the image below to play the animation.
[See post to watch Flash video]

The spa was designed using paper and pen, then drawn up in Illustrator to ensure the space worked nicely and then the design was taken into 3ds Max to be drawn up as a 3d design. The people are ‘cheated’ into the scene as they are simply cut out flat shapes with the image of the person mapped on in 3d. I tried using a neat trick in Max where you can rotate a piece of 3d geometry to always face the camera, but it looked odd, so I went with leaving the people mannequins simply droped into the scene.

The 3d visualisation and lighting set up for a scene like this is quite tricky. This whole model used the Vray physical camera to allow real world camera setup in order to help with the overall exposure of the 3d models and 3d scene. Another great tip for anyone doing 3d design work, is ambient occlusion in Mental Ray , it’s basically a quick global illumination method through the use of a shader. I used this technique to create an ambient occlusion render pass and then used this to add detail to the RGB (color) render in After Effects.