I initially created this model back in 2008, one of the first models created among the many present today. Back then I was creating it simply as a portfolio piece. It gained some visibility on the internet, and later that year was used in an advert for Sony-Ericsson in Spain and Portugal

I refreshed the render with Blender 3D this year. Superfast to render with cycles. Including a short animation.

A little history on the 16 year refresh

This project involved the creation of the Guggenheim 3d model, for the museum in Bilbao. The architectural model, was featured in a new Sony Ericsson W715 launch campaign in Spain and Portugal. All the initial modelling was done using visual reference gathered from what was available on the internet at the time. This consisted of visitor pictures of the Guggenheim 3d model, a few aerial elevations, and general information available on wikipedia.

All the initial organic shapes of the Guggenheim museum, were modelled in Maya with the nurbs modelling it had in place at the time. These were then converted into polygons, for further refinement. Creating the textures, especially the silver geometric fish scale texture for the guggenheim 3d model, was more tricky. It was also a challenge, to create the iridescent look on the reflective materials. The famous spider "Maman". Was created using polys. And

completed using Zbrush. Please see here for other organic models. The water, was created using a soft body simulation, as fluids had not yet been smoothly implemented into Maya. This can now be better achieved, using fluids, or even realflow. The simple solution was to add a Maya water texture, and animate the wave function in that. The final rendering was completed using mental ray, which was very slow and buggy at the time, but nevertheless produced something "acceptable". The render passes, we rendered a diffuse, specular, reflection pass, was then comped together.

The final composite was done in Shake which no longer exists. The landscape was a simple mountain created in Vue Xstreme.

You can check out more architectural visualisation projects here. Similar to this project was the Lukoil building project created for an artistic animation.

Please below for the full animation:

If you'd like a copy of the 3d model, get in touch here.