Ximo Peris - Creative Director
Smoothe

Ximo Peris was initially trained as an architect before moving into architectural visualisation in 1997. He lived in Holland for 3 years, teaching at TU Delft and working at DPI Animation House before moving to London and joining Hayes Davidson.

Since 2000, he has worked for Smoothe on many large scale animation and film projects across the UK and worldwide. Most notably Ximo liaised with the London 2012 bid team, delivered the CGI, co-ordinating an extensive team to create imagery and film sequences that very simply, yet effectively communicated the Olympic vision to a global audience. Other projects Ximo has delivered include work for Mercedes Benz to launch the new Mercedes Benz World at Brooklands, Orchid House, (Lower mill estate, waterfront Landmark homes project in the Cotswolds), which featured in BBC2’s design show and several large scale productions that incorporated green screen studio shoots for projects in the middle east. Ximo is currently overseeing production on the next suite of communication for the press for the Olympics and working on a large production in Kuwait promoting a mixed use district in central Kuwait City. Ximo regularly lectures and presents to students as well as architects on the language and techniques of visualisation in the construction industry.

Ximo also wrote a chapter for Brian Smith’s “3ds Max 2008 Architectural Visualisation-Beginner to Intermediate” that will be released on July the 31st.
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Visualising a Changing World: New Language and Production Methods used in Architecture Visualisation Until very recently, a simple fly through was a powerful marketing tool, but our industry is changing quickly. Film, interactive and advertising media constantly push our design sensibilities.

During this presentation, we will explore the Brooklands campaign as an example of the changes in our industry. All the images and animations were produced exclusively with 3ds Max for modelling, animating and rendering. During the early stages, we also use preview renders created with 3ds Max for the animatic edits.

Car advertising has transformed in the last 30 years. In the 1970’s, a car was sold mostly by describing its performance (speed, petrol consumption etc). Even an ad for Porsche was very similar to an article in a motor magazine! Today, a car is sold with ideas and emotions that play with our lifestyle dreams. With this evolution as a reference, we can explore how animations have changed in design visualisation.

At Smoothe we were lucky enough to get our hands on a project like Brooklands which crosses both the architectural and the advertising worlds. Since this project featured lots of cars, we made good use of 3ds Max’s plug-in based architecture to facilitate the animation with the “vehicle simulator” and ”reelmotion” plug-ins. These tools were used to simulate suspension and body movement for the many vehicles in the project. 3ds Max’s ability to handle large scenes was invaluable in this and many of our other projects.

The results of our narrative approach are more obvious in the animations, but the way we make still renders has also been affected. At Smoothe, we apply the same research, brainstorming and storyboarding methodology to create our still images as we do with our animations. In addition to Brooklands, we will take a look at some of our other projects produced with 3ds Max to give you a sense of our creative evolution.

Company Profile
Smoothe is a design communication company with studios throughout the UK and Europe Smoothe embraces new technologies to create cutting edge images, film, music, animation, events, exhibitions and websites which communicate ideas and messages whilst engaging and stimulating the audience. Recent work includes: provision of lead images and animation for the London 2012 Olympics; short film and animation work for prominent developers including Urban Splash and Hammerson, plus continual production of verified views for key developers across London Smoothe are also involved in producing fully integrated marketing campaigns for a commercial developer in Russia and website design for British Land and Capita Architecture.