A journey through an imaginary city between Paris and Beijing, in which objects take over. This dreamlike triptych reveals itself and lights up as the participant passes by, revealing another side of itself.
This installation is a collaboration with Lab212, and is based on _field for Hermès. It was made for Hermès and shown in Beijing in 2021
Behind the scenes
The artistic direction called for multiple complex features, like portals, mixed bezier, dynamic animation paths, selective post processing filters, edge detections, etc… Those were quite challenging to make work seamlessly together.
Thanks to this project, I also learned why Sketchup 3D models are generally frowned upon by game developers: While they look good from the outside, a lot of them are not optimised (pretty much the opposite, in fact: It would take some work to make such an unoptimised model with other software)… My very beefy GPU was struggling to hold 30 FPS with just a handful of models.
Seeing the bright side of Sketchup: This allowed me to get familiar with blender’s addon development, to create a custom cleanup and model optimisation tool. So, that’s something…
Also, thanks to covid, the whole setup had to be done remotely, using a combination of chinese chat apps, screen sharing and CCV feeds. This was fun!