The Halden: a photoreal launch site
A launch site for a fictional Brooklyn tower: scroll from the street to Residence 9C, then watch the sun set behind the glass.
The hard part
Photoreal light on a phone. Every frame is a Cycles render, streamed nearest-first and decoded in a sliding window, so 456 full-HD frames scrub smoothly without a video player.
Measured
- Frames
- 456 path-traced renders
- Chapters
- Street, facade, lobby, Residence 9C
- Time of day
- Golden hour to blue hour, on scroll
- Renderer
- Blender Cycles, scene built in code
Taken on the live build, 1440×900, cold cache. Reproduce them yourself.
How we built it
From a blank file to live, in 5 stages.
An early light test: plain massing, trees and a low sun. 1Block out the street and the walk
Before any material, we built the building, the street and the camera path in Blender with Python: street, facade, lobby, Residence 9C. The walk has to feel right at scroll speed first. Plain boxes are fine for this stage and wrong for every stage after it.
Brick tested on a flat wall before it went on the building. 2Materials that read as real
Brick with real mortar depth, bronze, limestone, marble. Every material is tested on a plain wall under the final light before it goes on the building, because repeating textures and flat surfaces are what make CG look like CG.
The double-height lobby, lit by the sun through the glass. 3Light through glass
The lobby and the residence are lit the way a photographer would see them: low sun through real glass with light portals, pools of lamp light, a little haze. The marble lobby took the most passes of any shot.
Residence 9C at blue hour, the city lighting up behind the glass. 4Golden hour to blue hour
Inside 9C, the scroll becomes the clock. The sun drops, the sky cools, and the city lights up window by window, staggered and varied so it never reads as a grid.
the-halden.vercel.app: every frame is a path-traced render. 5A site that plays 456 renders
There is no video player. The site streams the frames nearest your scroll position first and decodes them in a sliding window, so 456 full-HD renders scrub smoothly on a phone. It is built to be re-skinned on a developer's own renders or plans.
The Halden is our concept for a new-development launch site. The whole building (brick, bronze, limestone, a double-height marble lobby, a furnished corner residence and the surrounding city) is generated in Blender by code and path-traced in Cycles. The site plays those renders back frame by frame as you scroll: the camera walks you in from the street, and then the scroll becomes the clock, taking the residence from golden hour to blue hour as the city lights up window by window. It is built to be re-skinned on a developer's own renders or plans.
More of the hard parts.
All work
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