BlueLime Studio Blog

Architectural Animation of Lane Parke in the news

Bluelime Studio, working with our good friends over at Helivision, created an architectural animation of the proposed Lane Parke in Mountain Brook, Alabama. Working from drawings and sketches created by MVE Architects in California, and Goodwyn, Mills, and Cawood in Birmingham, we created a 6 minute animation of the proposed development.  Here’s a story about the project that includes a still image taken from the animation:

http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2009/05/a_proposed_mountain_brook_vill.html

We’re Famous

If you happened to be flying this holiday season on Delta Airlines, and read the December issue of Delta Sky Magazine, in the “Portrait” series highlighting our hometown of Savannah, Sky magazine interviewed Co-Founder Chad Warner for the article on “Knowledge Based Businesses” in Savannah. The article also included  a picture of the three owners (making them look much better than they really do). A PDF of the article can be found here:
http://www.bluelime.com/newsletter/q3-08/02_Savannah_dec_ideas.pdf

We’re award winners (again)!

Earlier in the year, we won a Gold Aurora Award for the architectural animation we produced for Magnolia Walk at Tradition Hilton Head. Not wanting our statuette to be lonely, we’ve also won a 2008 Telly award for our very own demo reel, viewable here: Bluelime Demo Reel. The Telly Award is the premier award honoring outstanding local, regional, and cable TV commercials and programs, the finest film and video productions, and groundbreaking web commercials, videos and films.

AutoDesk 3ds Max Design 2009 Review

The website CGArchitect, which is the leading website for all things related to computer generated architectural rendering and animation, asked me to write a review of the newly released Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009, the replacement program for AutoDesk 3ds Viz. I’m reproducing the review here.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009

With the release of Autodesk’s new 3ds Max Design 2009, the era of Autodesk Viz officially comes to a close. Positioned to take over the market that Viz filled, Max Design 2009 essentially replaces AutoDesk Viz for the Architectural Visualization market, while the original Max 2009 is still geared towards the traditional visual effects and entertainment industries.

The primary benefit to getting rid of Autodesk Viz is that instead of two development teams and two sets of code to write, there is only one primary engine, so (hopefully) the benefit will be apparent—a more stable, more intuitive software with a bigger jump in feature sets and fixes between releases.

READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY »

Review of our AIA North Carolina Animation

The website New Raleigh, which according to the site “follows cultural and citizen relevant news in Raleigh, North Carolina” has a glowing review of the architectural animation we produced for the AIA North Carolina Headquarters. Check it out here:
http://www.newraleigh.com/articles/archive/aia-headquarters-update/

New Headquarters for AIA North Carolina

At the AIA North Carolina Conference in Charlotte, the Design and Construction committee for the new AIANC Center for Architecture + Design unveiled the architectural animation of the building’s schematic design. BlueLime worked closely with team members at Frank Harmon Architect, the building’s designer, and David Crawford, the Executive Director for AIA North Carolina.

We were particularly pleased with the end product, which can be seen here:
www.bluelime.com/aiancvid

I’ll Gladly Trade My Kingdom For a Hamburger;

Said the King who wished everything he touched turned to gold. I guess in his greed, he failed to realize that even food and the finest pilsner would as well.

Recently we entered a competition by the name of the Aurora Awards. We submitted a couple of our finest pieces in hopes of recognition for our hard work, attention to detail, and diverse skill. Although we could only wish that they both came back gold; we’re happy with what happened.

Hellooooo Nurse!

For this project Core Communities came to us needing an Architectural Animation created showing off a neighborhood in their community that is currently under construction in South Carolina. You can check out the finished animation here!

Open house time (finally)!

We’ve been in our newly renovated/expanded space for just over a year now, and we’ve been so busy that we never had time to throw a grand opening party—until now that is.

At the prodding of (and in conjunction with) our good friends at The Creative Coast Alliance, we finally threw an open house/grand opening party. We had several of our clients show up to check out the new space, and met some new people that TCCa invited as part of the open house aspect of the party.

Thanks again to everyone involved, and also to everyone who attended! We might just have to make a yearly thing of it now.

Out With the Old, In With the BLU

I can’t explain with just words how awesome Blu-Ray is; but I’ll give it a shot! We have just completed a very large project that was output to Blu-Ray and it looks phenomenal! DVD’s have finally been laid to rest (in my humble opinion). Now all we need is for technology to become cheaper and more readily available so everyone can enjoy this leap forward in video entertainment.

I’ve always been into the DVD spec. Back in my college days I was always trying to push the envelope with the limitations that DVD spec 1.0 had. After experiencing those limitations and downfalls I had an idea of what I wanted DVD spec 2.0 to consist of. I was severely disappointed when all they added was online content and didn’t even touch the video stream rates, audio capabilities, or looping functions of the menu systems. Although my sound professor and I did end up with a 6 channel, uncompressed audio disc after doing a lot of tricking with the software. The DVD players decoder unfortunately couldn’t keep up with the mass amounts of data and played the audio on all 6 channels, but played it slowed down. Blu-Ray has since been able to achieve that with the introduction of the HDMI connection and multi-S/PDIF connections on audio receivers.

The future is very bright (and higher res!) with Blu-Ray being here. The experience people can now have when buying a movie is so much greater (especially from a developers standpoint). More screen space, better menu animation/looping functionality, serious online content which can be downloaded and played interactively with the disc. Maybe now people will actually watch the extra features.

BlueLime Studio at the AIA National Convention

So we exhibited at the American Institute of Architects (AIA) national convention in Boston this year, and while we won’t know yet if it was a roaring success, we definitely had a good turnout. We made quite a few contacts, gave out ALL of our squeeze limes, and met up with some old friends and clients.