MMB

The project “People and the City” is an exhibition project about the life in my hometown Bratislava from the beginning of the 13th to mid of 20th century. The theme is based on the river Danube and life flowing through the city.

My contribution to the project was to create a stylized interactive element that would bring enough information as fast to possible to the viewer. I recreated the city digitally in four different eras arount the beginning and the end of the 13th century, the 18th century and the mid of the 20th century. I’ll try to cut the production into parts.

The Presentation

The initial presentation was quite important for me as there was no backbone of the project and I wasn’t able to put my ideas in the correct order. So I’ve a presentation / mood board / philosophy sheet together to assemble all the informations I got. It didn’t help anyone but me and in the end the exhibition went another direction leaving my so called “backbone” in the hole. Shame? Maybe, but the exhibition was finally a success so what…

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The presentation was done in Prezi, a tool I adore for making short interactive stuff to bring ideas together. The images were party taken from an old graphic art work and party drawn by hand. Yes, you can spot the difference.

The Danube

The first installment was about the river Danube itself. About the changing flow, adapting to the needs of the people living there and later regulated by them. The idea was to show the different parts of the land between the meandres whose names sound so familiar even today. The river changed the land quite a bit but the names remained the same although their mean much today.

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The application was based on a real scanned landscape with 2D elements placed in a 3D environment. The camera was a non-interactive one, moving between hotspots and rotating to find the best angle to fit the most of the scenery in the view. Maybe not the best solution as the camera was moving constantly and the user found himself lost after a while. The camera was then changed to a non-rotating one. I liked this camera view (a slightly lower angle) much better so I made a capture of that one instead of the new smarter version.

This part was an easy one, preparing the landscapes, the textures and the different elements was more of a creative work and a lot of pain less than the next ones. The idea was also not to scare the visitor away with too much information and interactivity so the interactive part was done very kindly. It was all touch based on a large screen and very “beginner oriented”. All of the transitions were made slow not to lose focus, the texts quite short not to bore the reader. There were also many other version of the textures made, based on historical maps but then changed o a single style to avoid chaos. I think it went quite ok and I was pleased with the result.

1225 – 1260

Well, not exactly those years. The time span is much larger and one must be very tolerant when placing the digitally recreated landscapes onto the timeline. The more accurate eras should be around the beginning and the end of the 13th century. The two eras were chosen because of quite a huge evolution step in the architecture of the city (well, more of a settlement at that time). During that time the castle and a long fortification wall were build along some of the most important buildings that created the base for the city structure as we know it now.

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The scene was assembled in Unreal Engine, took quite a time but it needed to be stylized to get an atmosphere out of it. Especially because the building were lacking detail and there was no life on the streets. 

Here the navigation was a tougher one and we needed to create the environment completely in 3D to give a bit of freedom to the visitor. The camera moves between the hotspots but the user is able to rotate it in 360 degrees around it. This had to look natural so I finally decided to give it a “diaorama” look and miniaturize the scene. It helped and the scene looks more “haptic”.

For this scene I’ve had to build a tool for the assembly of the city building to speed up the creation process. It took a while to build one, then new features were added, then they needed to be subtracted in order to make them automatic which was then followed by a lot of debugging and debugging and debugging… You can imagine the face of my colleague who was intensively using the tool to build the city when he realized I again updated the tool and his finished (at least he said so) part of the model of the city suddenly vanished or were rebuild differently. Yes, it was a difficult path but it payed out, it helped us to finish the model as planned.

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1760 – 1950

Again, these years are far from exact. The ones that should be remembered are the centuries, second part of the 18th century when the city walls were demolished (because there was obiously no danger anymore) and the mid of the 20th century when the river Danube was finally put into control so there is no danger from this side either. It worked and helped avoid most of the floods.

The architecture of the city changed as well, aside from the center where the mentioned walls were dismantled, the city expanded and the industrialisation took the most beautiful parts of the city. And later, it became even more ugly.

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This scene is similar to the previous one with some “addons”. The traffic was put into action and there is an automatic day / night cycle (which unfortunately didn’t make it into the published version).

The traffic is also made with a custom tool. Not too difficult to make, it certainly needed to be remade more than once to keep the performance drop low. After the road paths werde created, the tool started spawning cars of different types and filling the streets. Luckily the streets weren’t that crowded these times so the number of the cars was kept small (not over 150). The cars have lights and react to each other to avoid collisions. As the style was kept minimalistic (miniaturistic actually) the movement of the cars was much easier to do, the “edginess” of the reactions of the vehicles made the scene more believable.

The same principle was used for the trams. An additional tool created a parallel rails for the opposite direction.

The Experience

It was a very fun project. Not too relaxing though as there was too much work to do for a small team. As with every project, the struggles with the source materials, planning and keeping the same deadlines couldn’t be avoided. As this was not just a content creation process, hardware needed to be installed, tested and at first it didn’t work. Would be very surprising if it did. Firstly, all of the computers were macs as I wanted to keep the power usage low and the applications didn’t need too much performance.

Unfortunately we chose interactive foils for the touch experience instead of touch screens. I was assured by the manufacturer that it will work on M1 macs… it did not. It disconnected often, the touch was not responsive and it took more than 10fps out of the application performance. As we were on the edge already (40 fps), it wasn’t going anywhere.

The holes in the panels were already made, the hardware bought… The only way was to keep the foils on the screens and to buy new, more powerful computers. It solved the problem. This all happened the last week so I don’t have to emphasize the stress around it.

The crew behind the project

Barbora Sablova: the texture artist helping me keep the design believable and consistent

Martin Ujvari: the main “city assembler” that kept soflty killing me during my tool updates

Jan Lucansky: the guy behind the hardware programming and the interactiveness

And me, keeping them calm during the creation process (and doing all the rest)