IBM INTERACTIVES
All work created by/for and owned by The Mill. I had the pleasure of working with the great people at the Emerging Tech division.
In late 2019 I had the pleasure of working with the great folks at The Mill Emerging Tech’s New York studio on an ongoing collaboration with IBM. The project, which had completed 1 phase before I joined the team, was to create a number of 3D scenes or dioramas depicting how IBM’s vast tool set is helping to shape an ever-more technology-driven world.
Check out the live site here!
Industry Dioramas
The core of the IBM Interactives project is the 3D dioramas. The project has expanded to dozens of scenes but I had the fortune to work on the dioramas for the consumer and manufacturing scenes.
Consumers in the Future
The first industry we tackled was the consumer industry. This industry was focused on both tracing the process by which a product comes to exist on store shelves as well as highlight the ways IBM’s technology has the opportunity to (and is already) shape that process.
Check out the models in their current iteration on the live site here! Or click on the images to get a larger version.
Our take on the future of agriculture includes a smart silo that communicates with farm equipment to maintain supply levels.
A future manufacturing plant includes an assembly arm with custom packaging, on-site development of new products and automated shipping.
Future retail experiences could include “infinite aisle” applications as well as roving check outs. Hybrid retail spaces with cafes are already becoming common.
THE SMART SUPPLY CHAIN
The next industry we tackled was the Industrial Supply Chain. The idea here was to track the different aspects of bringing a product to life — the cargo ship that hauls the parts, the factory that designs and assembles the product, and the office space where the idea is born and marketing — and how the IBM platform and tools are bringing these industries into the future.
Check out the live scene here!
A smart cargo ship uses GPS tracking for real-time monitoring of supply chain interruptions. If a navigation system finds rough waters ahead, it can alert the rest of the supply chain about delays.
A smart factory has humans and automation coexisting. Smart equipment provides more data than ever, creating new ways to monitor productivity and adjust to potential supply chain interruptions.
An agile office space where all the data from the previous two scenes is being used to inform the design process for the next product cycle.
FULLY INTERACTIVE
All of the 3D Dioramas we built are fully 3D in the browser experience. This created a number of exciting creative challenges knowing that a user is present exploring the scenes and as well as a number of technical problems such as polycount, texture baking and optimization.
Check out the 3D scenes in all their glory here.
DESIGN DEVELOPMENT
I made a lot of cool models on this journey. We were sketching in 3D pretty much immediately. I chose C4D because I knew its tools would let us iterate quickly without being too precious about our models while still knowing I’d be able to get a decent unwrap down the line. Here’s a small sample of some of the early iterations I did.
MODELING
After we had some initial models/set dressings, we took to texturing and lighting. All of this is done inside C4D’s advanced renderer. We had initially planned on using redshift, but at the time the process for baking textures did not seem as straightforward as our timeline demanded.
LIGHT AND TEXTURE DEVELOPMENT
UNWRAP AND BAKE
A new piece of the pipeline to me was unwrapping and baking the C4D files for use in the browser. This was a totally new process for me and forced me to learn a part of the CG pipeline I had mostly avoided for years. Here are some snapshots of some of the final unwrapped UV tiles:
