The Kahramaa Awareness Park is all about conservation and development of resources. The ride is a whimsical journey describing " The Life Cycle of Water " and how it makes its way from the skies to the ground and back again and how "Water" ties all life together on earth.
Both the script and the storyboard were written, planned and developed at the same time we were studying the facility space and doing concept designs for the canopy and set work. It was important for each scene to be able to fit into a predetermined ride-show area in the building. This early set of storyboard sketches helped us define the show and inspire the overall look and feel of the show sets. Set design and scene sketches were defined in CAD and refined in Photoshop and utilized in both the Maya models and the Virtual world.
Each scene was created ,designed and built in the VR world using traditional sketching, facility plans, sections and elevations and actually design-building in real-time in the virtual world. We could then import the higher quality mesh files and light them in-world with gobo special effects similar to the show lighting effects.
These shots are the show set designs in the VR world and are now also part of the show set and show special effects fabrication and installation packages used by the vendors to better understand the final product. The animation vendor is also using the ride through video to help generate the animation timing for the show animation scenes. We were also able to extract the camera path movement position, velocity and rotation from the Maya files to help start programming the ride and show control systems.
Ride Dispatch: Load/unload
The following video clips are rough cut placement studies to get a feel for how the elements might work together. It was a tight budget so we had to cut corners a bit, but this helped a lot.