Lerwick Port Authority have ambitious plans for future development of the north harbour of Lerwick and required a series of high-resolution images to bring life to the engineering designs that had been prepared.

Importing the CAD drawings were were then able to create a 3d model of the entire proposals, with all the necessary detail to locate everything exactly.

With the photos of the existing scenes also on the computer a virtual camera was created to match the location and properties of the cameras which took the original shots - making sure that the perspectives all matched perfectly.

move mouse over image to see the existing view

We were also asked to locate various ships in the images, to match the actual commercial operation which would be taking place, and to give a better sense of the scale of the works.

In some cases the ships could be composited from suitable photos, but as there were no aerial shots to match all the ships some had to be modeled in 3d.

Working from low angle images, full 3d models of were created and textured. These could then me moved without limits in 3d space, allowing angles and perspectives to be matched as required.

move mouse over image to see the existing view

Finally all the detailed textures and materials were built up from photos of similar materials and located in the images, using the 3d models to guide the positions and scales required. Working at such a high resolution mean many painstaking hours were spent at a high magnification working all the details into the exiting images seamlessly, but any imperfections become very clear once the images are printed and it is attention to detail at this stage that really pays off in the final images.

move mouse over image to see the existing view


The completed series of images, including cleaned up "before shots" was supplied to the LPA on disk for future web and print use.