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iClone: Build Your Own 3D City

By 3d city building, iclone


We like iClone, the 3D creation program that allows avatars to be lip synced and placed in 3d scenes, its perfect for story telling, presentations and pre-visualisation. Indeed we have recently used it in a grant bid, sometimes 3D avatars are better at communicating to an audience than 6 sides of A4 paper.

As such their new City Elements series of ‘props’ are of note providing modern New York style streets with Building System that can be connected and combined. The pack includes 12 buildings and 11 shops allowing the creation of a mid-rise neighborhood.

The movie below provides an insight:


The pack also includes props such as traffic signs and street lights with glow textures for users to make more realistic lighting effects. Their ‘How to Make Your Own City‘ page is well worth taking a look at.

HDR Panorama: St John’s Hampstead

By Flash Panoramas, HDR Panorama


High Dynamic Range panoramas should, in our view, be a first stop for any visualization of architecture, planning or design projects. They are quick to capture and provide a useful context for off site meetings or online communication of design. In addition they can be used as the basis for 3D modeling, complete with realistic lighting via the HDR capture.

The image above is of St John’s Church in Hampstead – a Grade I listed building and has stood on the site since 1823 in an architectural style more reminiscent of New England than London churches of its time.

Click ‘Load’ and drag to look around, select ‘Open’ to view full screen.

The St John’s website notes that:

‘As a proprietary chapel, St John’s is recognised as a church within the London Diocese of the Church of England but has complete independence in financial matters. It receives no support from and makes no contribution to Diocesan Funds. It is entirely self supporting and all costs, including staff and building costs, are borne by the congregation which has owned the building since 2003 when they bought it from the family trust which had owned it and leased it to them since the First World War’.

You can view a higher resolution version of the panorama via our Flickr Group.

HDR Panorama: St John’s Hampstead

By Flash Panoramas, HDR Panorama


High Dynamic Range panoramas should, in our view, be a first stop for any visualization of architecture, planning or design projects. They are quick to capture and provide a useful context for off site meetings or online communication of design. In addition they can be used as the basis for 3D modeling, complete with realistic lighting via the HDR capture.

The image above is of St John’s Church in Hampstead – a Grade I listed building and has stood on the site since 1823 in an architectural style more reminiscent of New England than London churches of its time.

Click ‘Load’ and drag to look around, select ‘Open’ to view full screen.

The St John’s website notes that:

‘As a proprietary chapel, St John’s is recognised as a church within the London Diocese of the Church of England but has complete independence in financial matters. It receives no support from and makes no contribution to Diocesan Funds. It is entirely self supporting and all costs, including staff and building costs, are borne by the congregation which has owned the building since 2003 when they bought it from the family trust which had owned it and leased it to them since the First World War’.

You can view a higher resolution version of the panorama via our Flickr Group.

Tilt Shift Maker: Free Tilt Shift Image Editing for Mini Cities

By Google Earth, Tilt Shift Photography, Virtual Earth

Tilt Shift photography is perfect for creating pictures of real-life scenes that are manipulated to look like model photographs. Thankfully you no longer need an expensive lens or a moderate level of expertise with Photoshop to make them thanks to Tilt Shift Maker.

Tilt Shift Maker is a free service that allows you to upload photographs up to 4Mb in size or 4096 x 4096 resolution and set the size/area of blur to create the tilt shift effect. Once your happy with your creation simply click ‘download’ to get a full size tilt shift image back.

Its a really neat service and completely free, you can use any photograph but oblique angles work well for tilt shift, as such Google Earth or Virtual Earth are perfect for trying out the effect.

See http://tiltshiftmaker.com/

For more examples see our post on Tilt Shift Mini City Videos

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