Al Raha Gardens.
2005: Doo Interactive built twelve villas entirely in 3D for ALDAR and rendered them as 360° stills and 360° video, frame by frame, without GPUs.
Villas that did not exist yet, in 360° video
Pure 3D, rendered frame by frame, without a GPU.
In 2005 ALDAR commissioned Doo Interactive to let buyers explore Al Raha Gardens, a new residential community in Abu Dhabi, before it was built. Twelve villa layouts, their interiors, gardens and the surrounding estate were modelled entirely in 3D and delivered as 360° still images linked by 360° video walkthroughs.
It was an early form of what is now called 360° video, computed at a time when rendering ran on processors alone.
The twelve villa layouts, each modelled, furnished and landscaped in 3D.
villa layouts
360° room views
360° video walkthroughs
rendered 360° frames
360° stills, linked by 360° video
Each room had its own 360° still. Between two rooms, Doo Interactive rendered a 360° video in both directions: A to B, and B to A. Visitors looked around a room, chose the next one, and travelled through the house while remaining free to look in any direction. The technique was then used for the DVD extras of major feature films; here it was applied to a property development, entirely in 3D.
Villa 06 below uses the original 2005 renders. Drag to look around and select a room: the living-to-dining and bedroom-to-bathroom moves play the original 300-frame transitions.
A render farm across two countries
Doo Interactive’s 3D team was organised by speciality: furniture, villa construction from the architectural plans, and integration of rooms, gardens and streets. Lighting solutions were computed in France and sent with each scene to a render farm in Dubai, where Xeon workstations rendered every frame around the clock. The frame sequences returned to France to be edited into the final 360° video.
Without GPUs, every frame was computed on processors, so scenes were optimised for speed: about twenty seconds for an interior frame, over a minute for an exterior with full vegetation. A strict naming convention kept the work in order: _01_AB-300 meant villa 01, room A to room B, 300 frames.
Actors in a 3D neighbourhood
For the community itself, Doo Interactive built the estate in 3D, with its streets, security gate, school, park and amenities, and composited actors filmed on blue screen into the scenes, using motion capture for the master shoot.
One disc, twelve villas
The final disc, built in Macromedia Director in November 2005, gave each villa a 3D plan of every floor, its 360° room views, animated walkthroughs, exteriors and an estate fly-through: 98 room views and 37 walkthroughs in total.
Before real-time 3D
Real-time engines and GPUs now render interactive 360° spaces instantly, and virtual tours of unbuilt property are standard. The Al Raha Gardens project delivered the same experience in 2005 by industrialising every step: specialised modelling teams, centralised lighting, a dedicated render farm and a naming system that tracked tens of thousands of frames.
Produced by Doo Interactive for ALDAR, 2005. Doo Interactive was founded in 1998 and grew into a team of 3D artists, video editors and multimedia producers.