Superstorm 2100
A fictive flood scenario for National Geographic Magazine
This 3D visualization of Manhattan illustrates a future secenario of possible flooded areas caused by a predicted storm surge in 2100. The scenario is based on a scientific research done by "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers" and is part of National Geographic's main topic for the september issue 2013. It displayes an absolute precise reproduction of Manhattan's city structure with its current buildings and all endangered flood zone.
National Geographic adressed us to design a very descriptive rendering of this scenario (all 7000 buildings where delivered by National Geographic Magazine).
German version: http://ixtract.de/portfolio-item/national-geographic-manhattan
German version: http://ixtract.de/portfolio-item/national-geographic-manhattan
A: Orientation for building positioning / B: Fictive surge / C: Relief of geographic hight levels
As different resources for relief-data, Gis-related information of Manhattan destrict and all the 3D buildings, it was quite a first challenge to merge all these diverse datasets to fit together properly.
3D modeled ground of Manhattan inclusive all flooded areas and important landmarks as green areas or sanded floors.
Layer compositing: A) Upper water + B) Shadows & ambient occlusion + C) Texture & material (lightning is not shown here) + D) Geometry of buildings.
Merge of three splitted sections in one final piece, as just opening the Scene in 3D with all buildings inside would have taken up to 10 minutes before you could see anything appearing there. Just the 7000 textures of the buildings had a load of 1,4 GB of compressed Jpegs.
Before we went to Manhattan, we tried some other scenarios with different atmospheres like here in Philadelphia. Left side flooded without rain, right side with rainfall. But in the end we prefered a more focus way to show the storm surge effects.
