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 "Photo: illustration courtesy of Thomas Linehan")
A team of UTD Arts and Technology (ATEC) students and faculty produced a detailed, 3-D video visualization of proposed projects in the Trinity Valley Corridor as part of a project for UTD's ATEC program.
The project started this spring when Gail Thomas, president of the Trinity Valley Trust, asked ATEC director Thomas Linehan if the department would be willing to help create a visualization of proposed construction projects in the Trinity River Corridor.
"We're an educational foundation and we're also attempting to raise money from the private sector to build out the Trinity River corridor. I needed a flyover of the Trinity River that showed the way the corridor will look when we've built it out," Thomas said.
Thomas said many Dallas residents don't realize how much undeveloped land runs through the city.
"Dallas is now the 4th largest metropolitan area in the U.S. We're the only city in the U.S., maybe in the world, with that kind of population and a 20-mile swath of nature running through the very center of our city. There are 10,000 acres of potential park and wild area and 6,000 acres of Great Trinity Forest. This is a wonderful possibility for Dallas if we do it right, and we want to do it right," Thomas said.
Linehan said UTD isn't taking a position on the construction of the Trinity Toll Road or any of the Trinity Valley projects, and the visualization is intended to help Dallas residents make an informed decision about the proposed construction projects.
The Trinity Toll Road has sparked controversy in Dallas, as some citizens feel it may harm park aesthetics, while others are opposed to a toll road for fiscal reasons.
"We started this project in May, before the Trinity Valley issue began to heat up. For us, this was a great opportunity to try to visualize the most recent plan that had been approved by the Dallas City Council. We got the CAD data for proposed projects and very carefully positioned everything into the video flyover. We view it as a kind of community service - this was something that gave ATEC and the University an opportunity to
showcase our abilities on something that was very important to the city," Linehan said.
Todd Fechter, ATEC faculty member and veteran of television and film animation projects including "The Ant Bully" and "The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius," directed the visualization project. Fechter said the team used Autodesk Maya, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop and a newly-upgraded ATEC computer lab to generate and render the structures that were superimposed onto existing helicopter footage.
"Originally, it was a 'we'll see what we can do' kind of project. We didn't really guarantee them anything because what was being asked was high-end, in that it takes a lot of time and a lot of people to really do it correctly," Fechter said.
"The Trinity Valley Trust took high-definition film footage of the Trinity Corridor from a helicopter and asked us to model the bridges, the lakes and streams, and how they visualize the plans they have at this point. We built the existing plans in 3-D and composited them onto the actual footage in the background that they shot for us, superimposing our 3-D elements on top of the live action elements to give an idea of how the plans look in context," Fechter said.
Linehan and the student team said Fechter's experience was key to the successful completion of the visualization.
"Todd Fechter has been the really important figure in this project. Todd comes with a rich background in production and in industry, so our being able to capture him as a faculty member is a great benefit to all our students. We needed someone like him who had experience organizing teams of animators," Linehan said.
Garman Herigstad recommended ATEC alumnus Karl Kohlman and ATEC masters' students Crystal Leal and Eddie Smith to Linehan for the project.
"We met with Trinity Trust at the end of June, but the entire team started in July. The project has been ongoing since then, five days a week, 40 to 50 hours a week. It has been a full time job for them for the last couple of months, plus Crystal and Eddie are graduate students and there are classes they have to take," Fechter said.
The visualization team shifted from an October deadline to a September deadline after Dallas mayor Tom Leppert saw the video.
"When our new mayor, Tom Leppert, came to UTD to visit with Dr. Daniel in August, he saw the video and said 'I need a copy of this quickly.' The mayor asked for the visualization to be finished by September 1 so voters could see it before the referendum," Thomas said.
The current visualization is the result of the accelerated deadline. The team continues to work on a second version. Thomas said the Trinity Valley Trust will present the newest version of the flyover footage at their November launch of the campaign for the Trinity River.
"We ended up getting all the pieces and geometry finished for the first deadline. For the second, there are a few alterations, and we can really spruce it up and make it look a lot better than the last one," Kohlman said.
Kohlman, Leal and Smith said the project was educational in many ways. They said learning to work on a team brought up issues like conferring on naming conventions for structures that might have many different versions and layers. They also had to be certain they were always working within the same scale. The uncompressed files for the visualization filled a 500-gigabyte hard drive. The video is 2,100 frames from start to finish, and each frame has many layers.
"We had a foundation for many of the skills, but we hadn't worked directly with visualizing architectural models and things like bridges, trees and lighting techniques. Many of the things we learned came from the necessity. We needed to utilize certain aspects of software we had used before, but we hadn't used those certain aspects," Smith said.
"We've learned as much doing this over the last couple of months as we would in a couple of semesters of school," Kohlman said. "We're all generalists and every one of us had to handle every stage of this project, whereas if you move to a company, they'll put you in a department, and you'll just do modeling or lighting. Here, we get all the experience."
Kohlman, Leal and Smith said they will offer at least one presentation on software techniques and skills they've acquired during their work on the visualization project.
Linehan said future ATEC projects similar to the Trinity Valley visualization are important because of the real-world experience they provide, but will be selected carefully.
"We don't want to be in the business of visualization as an educational institution, but projects of this type give our students intensive internship opportunities on campus where they have to step into production, deal with the client and produce a visualization," Linehan said. "We need to stay tied to the community and to industry, provide a future-oriented education for our students, and provide the North Texas community and local industry with a talent pool of digital content designers that's unparalleled."
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