The Nest – Flamingo Observatory
‘The Nest’ is a Flamingo Observatory proposed by NUDES, Mumbai in Abu Dhabi as a part of the Flamingo Observatory competition by Bee Breeders.
From the visualization side, the main challenge was creating the vegetation. The wetlands had a unique set of vegetation and part of communicating the design well consisted of building the landscape in 3D close to the real site. I identified 3-4 types of vegetation and did a few variations for each of them and finally scattered them on the landscape using particle systems.
The entire scene is pretty much 3D except for the sky and the trees at the back.
The Nest – Flamingo Observatory
View of the boardwalk
The Entry
Interior space with spiraling ramp
Post-production breakdown
Typical post-production file
Post-production breakdown
Leaves of the reeds. These are then distributed on the reed stem using particle system. I got some really nice leaf textures from the Blender Cloud.
Variations for reeds
Salt Bush
The base shape of the bush is generated by tracing particles simulated from a roughly modeled ground mesh patch. In order to add some randomness to the growth I added a turbulence field at the center.
Then those hairs were converted to mesh and particle hairs were added on top for the leaves.
Salt Bushes. I also created dried up versions for the same two bushes.
These are smaller salt bushes modeled using the same particle tracing technique and the small buds were again distributed using particle systems.
Wetland Shader Breakdown
The roof was done using particle systems as well. A collection of thatch particles (low-poly) was set to be distributed from the roof structure along the normals.
Roof thatch particle variations (collection)
One skin thatch member
Skin thatched were distributed using DupliGroups using the mesh Faces. In order to not have multiple thatch members per wooden piece, I used a stripped down duplicate of the wooden frame that had only one face per wooden member.
