Back in August of 2019 we were approached by Gensler to assist them in visualizing a new home office for Walmart in Bentonville, AR. The 350 acre campus was to consist of 12 office buildings, 9 parking garages, 1 state-of-the-art fitness facility, a high class dining hall and a full size conference / convention and auditorium center. In addition to all of the buildings on campus, SWA was charged with encapsulating all of the function into a natural campus that incorporated the outdoors with horticulture. Our task was to take all of the information from all the consultants working on this massive campus and turn it into something visually understandable, accurate and yet aesthetically pleasing. Over the course of the last 5 years we worked with 9 consultants creating over 380 draft renderings and 280 final renderings to flesh out what is now a beautiful campus. In the process we were also included in a few of the design decisions that made their way into construction. Now that the campus is complete and open, we able to share just a few of the concept illustrations and renderings that so many worked on to help bring this campus to life. We are grateful to all of our amazing clients and partners for being involved in such an incredible and gorgeous project from start to finish!
So how did we create these images? We knew from the start that we would need a master file that had every single 3D asset that existed on campus. This file included every single building, vegetation, tree, people, cars, all the way down to the interior finishes. Having a file that contained all of the assets not only made it very flexible for us to explore various camera angles, but also way finding, lighting, and entourage. Our tool of choice for renderings has always been 3dsmax, and Walmart was no different. Back in 2019 we were using V-ray as our production rendering engine. Of course 5 years is a long time for a project and we went through several versions of software having to upgrade our files in the process. At one point we even went through the process of overhauling the scene from V-ray to Corona and Forest Pack to Chaos Scatter. As the scene grew, we optimized our files and were impressed with how far we could push the software and just when we expected too much of it, we used new solutions and ways to export assets to other reference files, just to make the scene manageable and efficient.
Some stats: In the end the master file came out to a mere 730mb in file size. We had only 1 reference file for all the buildings (956mb) while the master file contained all of the proxies and lighting data. The resulting file had a total of 730 unique proxy objects, 15289 instances, and 20 different scatter objects based off of the unique proxy objects, such as vegetation and ground covers.
More to come!