FlyingArchitecture at the times of Covid

/ by Lenka, FA manager

Greetings to everyone out there in the wild! Hope you’re holding up strong!

Just going out to a store to buy food does feel like wilderness these days, don’t you think? :-D I’m a bit exaggerating, but still who would have thought in early March that we would go through such a global crisis?

Anyway, here at Flyingarchitecture, we wanted to reach out to you and share what it’s been like for us so far.

Like most of the arch-viz industry, we feel the impact of Covid ourselves. The business slowed down, giving us time to sharpen our skills and work on in-house projects. We rarely can take time to focus on them through the year, being busy with our client’s projects. We’d been planning to polish our skills in a few workshops before they got canceled anyway so why not make the most of this ourselves?

So what have we been up to?

As a first thing you may have noticed new additions in our portfolio. Many of our recent projects are under NDA, so we are pretty excited to be finally able to post this new stuff! And there is still more where that came from! :-D

Yosi covered himself in sand and carved a complete city out of a desert canyon. Read up what he has to say about his process:

Following the initial worry over the rapidly escalating health situation I've started to realize it could be used for something good. Even though lack of free time isn't usually a big problem for me, work life with tight deadlines and huge projects still takes its toll especially on one's health. It's not easy to work on something just for yourself or learn new things, so one often ends up trying to avoid the screen.

I've always been a fan of living with the elements; not trying to bend the rules of nature to your favor, to run away from them, but to adapt. As a practical person, I also find it much easier. The concept of climatic architecture came one night to me and immediately stuck and grew into the Desert Ark, a sci-fi project in the near future. Situated in sun-scorched Africa, it would be one of humanity's last strongholds, a shelter from the heat and ravaging desert storms and a guardian of knowledge and science. It also allowed me to expand on my knowledge of Substance designer which I plan to use more and more often in the future.

Matus has been into dinosaurs since forever, it has to be love or something :-D Read on:

I came up with an idea to bring to life another of our very own projects … Flying house. Such a project was in the very beginning of FlyingArchitecture and since then, I didn’t find a proper spot in our schedule to develop the idea further. Thanks (!) to the situation, I found a window to jump on it again and to find out what could be done now, after years of doing the high end imagery. This time, I decided to go for a full 3D environment, using only our internal FA libraries. 

It’s a bit complicated to work with 2 kids in a small apartment, but I am trying to manage that on fly :) What I like the most? My 2.5yr old asking 3 times a day: "Daddy, is your render running now?"

As usually, I used mostly Rhino, V-Ray and Photoshop, but Sculptris was utilized to create all natural hard surfaces - rocks, mountains, terrain. A bit of Blender was used as well. I did a whole dedicated article about the process so check it out!

Eťo took up a whole huge stadium on his shoulders and delivered:

When it comes to personal projects, it's always difficult to choose a topic that is not only interesting but close to me. This is what gives the project character and helps to add something extra to the images. "Surprisingly" the path is the past, namely my childhood. Arts, music and especially sports were the basis of my early development and a long-term life goal at that time. Football has always been closest to my heart and without having discovered a passion for architecture, I would have been probably just kicking a ball in a small village league with ruined dreams of a professional career today.

So, the topic is clear, but what's next. Why not to design a new national stadium of Slovakia? In the process, I realized how hard it is, even though I had a fairly realistic idea of ​​the possible problems and challenges given that I was an architect. This process made me realize how difficult it is to combine a realistic design and give it something original and still think like an artist in order to achieve images with impact and strong storyline. I ended up with the concept of telling the course of life of the stadium from early morning until the end of the day. It gave me the opportunity to show various activities and people in a seemingly unchanging space which is the biggest challenge.

Masha takes this Covid crisis seriously, her laboratories will sure give it a tough fight:

Surely it is terrible what is happening in the world, everyone knows it. My personal project shows that everything bad is good for something. The situation inspired me and introduced me to the scientific sphere, which I began to study with great enthusiasm in the dimensions necessary for the project. Obviously, these images will tell you about the creator a lot of character traits :D Mine is minimalist, austere, dark and chilly. Like Covid, the story of my research facility is tragic and full of suspense, but finally with a happy ending (I like them the most in movies :)

Dingo has been into our new showreel. It’s being edited right now, so you can expect it pretty soon on our vimeo page:

Quarantine is new for all of us, and it is a rather unpleasant situation. On the other hand, it opens the door for self-improvement and personal growth. It is also a good time to look at the past.

Our studio took this route and we looked at several-years-old projects and decided to breathe life into them again. My task was to turn the original static projects into animations with the help of movement. The initial selection of projects was relatively wide, and I tried various atmospheric studies and colour variations. Later, after evaluation, I decided to narrow the selection to just a few sequences, to which I paid attention and fine-tuned the details. Naturally, we communicate with the entire team on a regular basis and exchange views on each other’s work, which helps me a lot when creating such a project. After spending a few quarantine days working on the same visualisations, my concentration begins to fade, but my colleagues always draw my attention back to the details. Communication with colleagues is very important these days, and I recommend it to everyone. In a way, it is also a great motivation!

I will not reveal any more information as you can look forward to our new Showreel, which will appear in the portfolio in a short time.

And lastly you may have noticed our website redesign, which was my (Lenka's) responsibility. The main point was to organize the site a bit and bring out our studio section more. Have you wondered who is actually behind the scenes? Read up on our team, who we are and what we can offer in the STUDIO section. And of course all of our 3D models, materials, scenes, tutorials and photos (new section!) are still up here, all gathered under the STORE section. We hope it’ll be easier for you this way to search and browse through our collection. We added one new label – Free, so you can filter out this category now.

We’d like to hear your thoughts on the website, any feedback is much appreciated! So if you feel like it, give me a note at [email protected] or use our contact form.

We’ll go back to work on our projects now. When we have new stuff to share, you’ll be the first to know! ;-)

Take good care of yourself and make the most out of these days! Stay healthy!


For all of Flyingarchitecture team,

Lenka


PS. Wish you all the best from our home-offices:









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