Cloth Halls of Ypres - UNESCO World Heritage

3D visualization project commissioned by the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres.

In preparation of the centenary commemoration of World War I, ‘3D Square’ joined hands with art director Filip Martin of production house ‘Fijne Beeldwaren‘ to take on the project of visualizing the Cloth Halls of Ypres (UNESCO World Heritage Site) in 3D for the reopening of the In Flanders Field Museum.
A very challenging and large scale project, the goal was to visualize the Cloth Halls in different stages of the war, when the entire city was bombarded to the ground and eventually rebuild into the site as it is now. With all the architectural plans destroyed, all we had to go on were old pictures, aerial shots and postcards to figure out the geometric composition of the structure. Cross referencing them with the old foundations of Ypres we set forth on the arduous journey of recreating the 6 different stages of bombardment as historically accurate as possible.

Generalist TD – Technical Supervisor

• Maintaining work schedules; meeting with art director and external parties to review overall progress; keeping delivery on target.
• Researching historical records to ascertain structural breakdown; intensive reference search and studies.
• Establishing best approach to optimize workflow and asset reusability in constructing the structure through 6 different stages of time.
• Prototyping and dividing overall structure into smaller workable segments.
• Rigid body simulation using Nvidia PhysX plugin to simulate plausible debris spread; low monochrome resolution references made it hard to distinguish between debris and actual ground.
• Modelling assets; fracturing using boolean operators and Voronoi; adding supporting geometry to match photographic reference.
• Creating final shader to optimize look on HoloCube technology.
• Troubleshooting artifacts caused by limitations in HoloCube technology; testing different levels of detail for a stable projection on the Holofoil.
• Render wrangling; compositing final output.

Final Render – Holographic visualization can be found in the In Flanders Field Museum, located in the Cloth Halls of Ypres.

Seamedia project interview: In Flanders Fields Museum