Award-winning Bose Store designed with CINEMA 4D: Talking with Stephane Bernier of Aedifica
by Mary Dell

3d tools are becoming essential for architectural design work. Montreal Architecture and Design firm Ædifica used MAXON's CINEMA 4D for their recent design of the new Bose store in New York City. The store won two awards in the Institute of Store Planners 2004 Store of the Year competition: Honorable Mention, Hardlines Category, 1500 sq.ft and less, and First Prize, Innovative Fixturing. Stéphane Bernier of Ædifica talked with me about the Bose project and their "risky" approach to adopting new 3d tools.

Ædifica, with offices in Montreal and St. Louis, provides a broad range of services to clients, ranging from large-scale institutional jobs such as convention centers and schools, to small retail shops. Bernier explains, "most of our workload, and most of the projects that I work on, are on the retail side, designing store interiors concepts." Ædifica works with retailers in the United States, Canada, and the UK to design and execute store retail environments. "Typically, we often develop the concept, and after that we roll-it out , adapting it to different environments multiple sites across the different states and provinces in Canada and the US." Unlike firms that are limited to design work, Ædifica is multi-disciplinary, "so we do the whole scope of interior design from concept design to construction drawings to project management to engineering." Ædifica creates construction drawings that contractors, millwork and construction workers use to build out the retail space. They also are frequently involved in graphic design, working with designers and ad agencies to develop a communication package that parallels the development of the 3d environment. There's practically nothing Ædifica doesn't do: "the extent of our services varies according to the needs of our clients: we'll do everything," says Bernier. "It often depends on the budget and the time we have and what we the client wants to do, for example, but I'm working on two spas right now - one is on Madison Avenue in New York, one is in Union Square in San Francisco - and we are doing an extreme make-over, basically gutting the existing space to create a new futuristic environment, we are doing new stair cases, new air conditioning, new flooring, new lights, new wall finishes, new cabinetry and new furniture."

Bernier and Ædifica are fearless in adopting new 3d tools. They recently began using the Sketch and Toon module for CINEMA 4D, to mimic the look of hand drawing in 3d rendered images. "It's really funny actually, because each time there's a new module or a new feature, we try it right away on a realtime, due-in-two-weeks project, which is the most risky, unsafe and perilous way. It's a crash and burn type of thing, where we just try it out. That's how it happened with radiosity, when we'd just got upgraded to version 7 of CINEMA 4D, which was new at that time. We used it in a design competition for a high-end fashion version concept of the Sunglass Hut stores, which we won. , and we ultimately made built about 10 stores, ." Ædifica got the Sketch and Toon module last December, and two weeks later they were using it on a project with an extremely tight deadline. "We had this really funky contract to design develop 3d sketches for a store environment in a cruise ship. The store’s program included had to be a souvenir shop, casual clothing/tee shirts/, hiking/outdoor gear and a /kids clothing and toy shop store, in a cruise ship. So it was a rush job. We got the job about seven days before Christmas, and it had to be done by January 8th. Since some people had already committed to taking off for the holidays in December and January, we had about eight days to create something."

The "kid's zone" in the store had to include a huge octopus-shaped fixture with shelving. "That's something that's really hard to draw as a hand sketch, because everything is curved, and it had these huge tentacles. It was a 10 foot by 10 foot octopus, with all these tentacles and shelves. So we drew that using Sketch and Toon, mixed with some of the other rendering options that we had. We started with the octopus and did the outdoor gear and the walls using Sketch and Toon to render our environment, and we basically ended up doing the whole store--we were so happy about how the renders were coming out, and how quickly they were coming out, that we did the entire store, which was 5 or 6 perspectives, entirely with CINEMA 4D and Sketch and Toon. Obviously we added some post-effects with Photoshop and did a bit of work to place some merchandise. We also composited the Sketch & Toon render over another rendered version of the scene, using SLA Cheen and a very basic light rig. We had only planned for one shot being made by CINEMA 4D and all the rest was going to be done by hand. But things worked out so well that we did everything with CINEMA 4D, and the client actually never knew that it was 3d. It was really, really easy to do. It was surprising how easy it was to use, and it's part of our toolset now; it's one of our options for rendering the environments that we do. I actually thought I'd end up using it more Often but we kind of mix it up, we'll do a full rendered image and put one or two things that'll be in Sketch and Toon to add some effect to it."

The award-winning Bose store in New York City is a project where Ædifica used 3d tools for every stage of the work, from the initial color concepts to the final construction drawings. Bernier explains that this is not always the norm: "In some cases we will use 3d tools for our presentation work, and we'll stop there. Once we get to the stage of producing precise construction drawings and plans, it gets handed over to another Ædifica team that is much more 2d-based, and then they take the project and finish it up."

When starting a new project, Ædifica gets a complete scope of the work to be done, including detailed information about the products and items to be displayed in the store. "We need that to be able to design the space that will match the client's needs in terms of product display, and will be in line with their marketing and operational strategy. So we get all that information--where they want to put it, how they want to display it, in what order or sequence. In the case of the Bose store it was a building under construction, so for quite a long time we were just going on the plans and drawings that the building owner was supplying us. But when our space was fitted out to a point where we could actually measure some walls, we had somebody from our office fly down to go and see the space, take photos and measurements, and see what had changed between the theoretical drawings and what was actually built. Some things actually had changed; it often happens that some walls are not actually aligned the way they are drawn, or you have some new pipes, or the columns are bigger than they planned for whatever reason."

For the Bose project, Ædifica started off by creating a 3d version of the space and using it to create a general ambience. "It was just taking the space and showing it in 3d with the wall colors, to see what kind of mood we wanted to have in terms of colors tone and style," says Bernier. "We would have white walls with one blue wall, or white walls with an orange ceiling, for example, or an orange floor - we did it in a very conceptual way, just playing with light to try to define the space. We didn't have any consideration about product or how anything is actually built, it was just shapes and light and color to try to find the mood of the store at a very early stage, so we did about 20 different moods of the same space, taking the same shot of the store in 3d and defining a mood to get a consensus from the client." These concept renderings were printed up on a large scale board with some other construction drawings and shown and presented to the client, in order to come to an agreement on the general mood, tone and style of the store.

"After that we started sketching in 3d to start building some of the components of the store. In this case it was our first project where we did the whole modeling from A to Z in CINEMA 4D." On previous projects they had done the modeling in Form-Z, "which is a bit more CAD-based." Bernier explains why they made the switch from Form-Z to CINEMA 4D for the Bose project. "We had an awful lot of curved surfaces, ellipses, circular walls, and circular fixtures in the space, and that was something where it becomes more difficult in Form-Z. We would have been somewhat limited in the way that we built the model, whereas in CINEMA 4D we could use a spline-based modeling environment, and also an environment where we could easily edit the model afterwards. Once we placed a shelf in the space in the store along a curved wall with a specific radius, it was really easy for us to duplicate that shelf in CINEMA 4D using instances, then when we and edited the source shape...and it would change all the other shelves in the space." These changes were accomplished by using "a few of the plug-ins that are available to really precisely duplicate components along a spline; one of the plug-ins is called MSA [Multiple Spline Attach]. We had a large curved wall--a 269 inch radius wall, so a very specific radius on the wall--and we were able to place hundreds and hundreds of objects very precisely onto it using the MSA plug-in, based on the splines that we'd drawn up and imported from AutoCAD. And afterwards, because of CINEMA 4D's nondestructive modeling environment, we were then able to extract the modified splines and re-export them back to AutoCAD for the final construction drawing." Previously, when modeling in Form-Z was completed, "we would give it to the construction team and they would often start from scratch, just redrawing it entirely, whereas in this case we were able to save the work by transferring some of the splines through illustrator and AutoCAD."

Also, they were able to refine the model as they worked, going from the initial concept of simply light, color, and shape, to "a very precise and refined environment at the end, where we had all the fixtures and product there--the remote controls, the speakers. It was a very good test of what we were doing, and in this case we were also able to design some very precise attachments for the products. The headphone displays, for example, had an interface with some buttons, so we were first able to start off at the large scale, which was to show the walls and colors, and then go down to the very detailed level of the speaker attachments and headphone display interfaces using the same tools and the same 3d models in the same environment. And when we visited the store once it was opened, nobody was really surprised, because it was exactly what we'd shown in renderings."

Bernier started working in 3d at the University of Montreal, where he graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Architecture in 1995 before going to work for Ædifica. "The University had a very good academic program with Apple computers and Form-Z, Photoshop and other software. Back then it was MAC II's--we didn't even have internet--it was only for very specialized and select uses that anyone had internet access at that time. We started working on computer software, computer rendering and 3d modeling at a very early stage. The first 3d I used was Form-Z, and at that time it didn't have much rendering capability...didn’t have a rendering module, so the university had StrataVision as a rendering tool. But often we would just model in Form-Z and then just print out the wireframe or hidden line rendering, which would still take about twelve hours at that time. And then we would redraw by hand, with watercolor, paint, or pastel colors, or markers and felt pens. So it was a very mixed media environment."

"And that's still true now, because we often may sketch something by hand, and then may add some 3d-rendered objects that are rendered as if sketched by hand, and also have some pure 3d synthetic environments, all in the same presentation. We feel that for our clients it becomes an issue of expectations, and sometimes it's better to show something, an early sketch, in a very rough form, whether drawn by hand or rendered as if drawn by hand, just to set the expectations at a certain level in terms of the conceptual refinement. Often when you have a render that's too slick, too crafted, it actually will send the message to the client that the concept is finished, here's their idea, and they can't change it. Or they'll pick on things that they wouldn't pick on if it was just shown as a very early sketch. So sometimes basically, we have to be careful what we show--we don't want to go too fast to fully rendered a lit environment, because it often doesn't help the way the client perceives the process. So for the first rendering it might just be a hand-drawn, photoshopped rendering, maybe in plan or elevation, or a 3d sketch. Sometimes we'll graduate to a 3d model, but it may be rendered in a more cartoon, or hidden line, or more of a conceptual artistic fashion. And then after that, at the end when we have all the components, we know exactly what the product is, where the lights are, what the materials are, what Point of Purchase (POP) material or posters or communication that they may have in the store, then we'll render the whole enchilada and put in all the effects. And sometimes they don't realize that it's the same model that's just been updated and rendered in different ways."

Bernier and Ædifica started using Cinema 4D in 1999, on a job for Apple. Bernier recalls, "we were invited by Apple computers to do a bit of research on a possible 'shop-in-shop'--an Apple kiosk in a CompUSA, for example. We had 2 months to develop some concepts for them. At that time we were using Form-Z for 100 percent of our 3d modeling requirements, but we were getting a bit frustrated with some issues we had with the software and some rendering issues also. We had just finished a competition for the Montreal convention center expansion, and we'd had a lot of last-minute problems with our computers and with the software crashing. So that made us want to look elsewhere to get a faster, more optimum and higher-quality solution for rendering purposes. So a A couple of months later we got the Apple contract, and we did the modeling in Form-Z, and after only having the software in-house for one month, we decided to go with CINEMA 4D 5.3 as our tool to render our concepts. It just about saved our lives, because we were changing things up to the last minute, and before, we were having 8 or 10 or 12 or 24 hour render times with Form-Z, and suddenly we could do everything in, like, 15 minutes. And we could render at a better, higher quality and higher resolution with a lot more lights, a lot more effects, and reflections. And we were pretty happy with the images, especially considering what we had to do and the time that we had to spend on them. So that was the first job where we used CINEMA 4D, and that was when it was version 5.3, so that's quite a while. We still use continued using it, but we were still using both Cinema 4D and Form-Z as our main a modeling tool, just because I've been using it since Version one, it still works well for some purposes, so I knew it by heart. And it served our purposes, but more and more recently we've been trying to model with CINEMA 4D and having a lot of fun with it."

You can learn more about Ædifica at their website, http://www.aedifica.com.