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Shedding Light

By Edmund Manger

Computer-generated art prompted The Torrance Co. to pick a blue-gray floor for its Del Amo Fashion Center.

Thanks to a realistic, computer-generated picture, executives at The Torrance Co. saw exactly what the terrazzo floor pattern it had picked would look like after the renovation of the Del Amo Fashion Center. Which is just as well.

“They saw it and they hated it,” said Julie Pesusich, a partner and executive producer at Liquid Light Studios, a Los Angeles-based company that makes animated illustrations showing how buildings will appear before they are built. The images, while two dimensional, have a 3-D appearance.

In the case of Del Amo Fashion Center, located in Torrance, Calif., the computerized model enabled its owners to take a tour through the center, allowing them to fully appreciate — or not appreciate, in the case of the mauve and gray floor — the impact of the renovation. Work is scheduled to begin on Del Amo, one of the largest enclosed centers in the United States, in the spring.

“That right there saved them a lot of money and a lot of headaches,” said Pesusich, who founded her company with business partner Steve Brinca four years ago.

So The Torrance Co. picked a blue-gray color instead for the floor, “and then they loved it,” Pesusich said. “It corresponded a lot more to the rest of the design and the rest of the color palette.”

The Torrance Co. did not return calls seeking comment.

Architects not only like to be able to show their clients how a building will appear, but also want to see for themselves.

“You can have a much more accurate feeling for what you’re designing,” said William Burch, of the Manhattan Beach, Calif., firm William Burch Architects, which designed the Del Amo Fashion Center renovation. An architect can use the images to judge whether, for instance, he needs to tone down the lighting in one part of a building, or change a particular wall texture so it relates to its surroundings, Burch said. “For us it’s a tool — a design tool and a tool of communication with a client.”

The beauty of computer-generated art is, literally, in the details. Not only is it accurate, right down to the door handles, but tell the computer that you are using 60-watt lighting, and it will display the appropriate brightness. It will do the same with skylights, wall colors and other materials.

Building owners can make as much use of these animated visuals as architects, using them to show their potential clients — the tenants — the type of space they are offering.

“Computer animation is an amazingly valuable marketing tool,” Pesusich said.

The genre certainly is more versatile than the two-dimensional artist renderings that architects and developers still use, Burch observed. Not only are these limited in how accurately they portray a project, but they are expensive, too.

In the case of the proposed terrazzo floor at the Del Amo Fashion Center, an artist’s rendition of the project would have been misleading, according to Pesusich.

“If they had gotten this on a 2-D illustration, then it would have looked great,” she said. “And then they would have had a very bad surprise at the end.”

Computer animation, on the other hand, leaves little to the imagination, Burch said.

“Once you have that information in the computer, of course, you can look at whatever it is you want to see, from anyplace you want to see it.’’

The same can be said for scale models, which remain a popular way of portraying buildings in 3-D, and have been for centuries. Following the Great Fire of London in 1666, Sir Christopher Wren built a wooden model depicting his vision for a new St. Paul’s Cathedral.

But the trouble is that while models do a good job showing what the outside of a building will look like, depicting interiors is a much greater challenge. While Wren’s 18-foot-long “Great Model,” which today is on display in the cathedral’s crypt, enabled a person to climb inside for a preview of St. Paul’s glorious interior, few architects today have the space or budgets to go to those lengths.

The process

To turn an architect’s vision into something tangible, Liquid Light Studios’ artists begin by using the blueprints to depict the overall design. Then, to transform drawings into realistic projections of the real thing, they go a step further, using a library of hundreds — perhaps even thousands, Pesusich said — of images previously scanned into the computer of nearly every building surface and material the company has ever encountered. From pine floors to stucco walls, chances are Liquid Light has it archived.

“If we don’t have something that they’re going to be using, they can bring it and we will scan the image into the computer,” Pesusich said.

With the building “constructed,” the company can go a step further, if the client likes, putting in people, landscapes and cars. The final product is put onto a video or, if the customer prefers, transferred to another format such as a CD-ROM.

The results

Where appropriate, the resulting images can be made to move. This was done for a job Liquid Light recently completed for Six Flags Theme Parks, which showcased a roller coaster planned for its Magic Mountain theme park, in Valencia, Calif. The result is a two-and-a-half-minute video of the entire ride that depicts grand views of the surrounding landscape and other rides that will be visible from the roller coaster’s summit, and the stomach-walloping plummets that immediately follow. Six Flags has subsequently used the video to promote the roller coaster in television advertisements.

The amount a client pays varies considerably, depending on the complexity of the product. A recent exterior modeling of a Macy’s store, including an attached parking structure, cost $3,800. At the other end of the scale, the Six Flags project came with a $50,000 price tag.

The versatility Liquid Light Studios shows going from illustrating shopping centers to roller coasters is reflected in the company’s history. Television served as one of the company’s original customers, when it was commissioned to produce the animated “dancing baby” that appears on “Ally McBeal,” as well as the character animation on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show.”

Last year a short film Liquid Light made for Mexican filmmaker Jorge Ramirez-Suarez, called “Pronto Saldremos del Problema,” (Your Problems will Soon be Over), a dark comedy, won the award for “Best Animated Short Film” in Mexico City.

The company also has made CD-ROM games, which helped provide it with the skills it would later use in its architectural work, Pesusich said.

Today, Liquid Light, which employs just half a dozen staff members, focuses exclusively on the architectural and construction fields. A lengthening list of retail projects in its portfolio includes University Village, a development by the University of California, Riverside, consisting of stores, restaurants and a movie theater.

“We have a small studio with a huge talent,” explained Pesusich.

Yet on another level, Liquid Light has grown enormously, fueled by a potent combination of human imagination, the willingness to accept new challenges and, Pesusich noted, another factor: “The technology is always advancing.”