Departed Summer 2024
ESD Pavilion
ESD campus · 3D / Arch viz · Shipped
[image: Final ESD Pavilion render — modern geometric tiered stone water fountain in foreground, manicured lawn, paved walkways, detailed trees casting realistic dappled shadows, brick buildings with large windows forming the perimeter, bright sun under a clear blue sky]
Departure
I'd walked the ESD campus every day for years and never once tried to build it. I wanted the whole thing in Blender — the brick buildings with the green trim, the church with the red multi-pitched roof, the football field with EAGLES painted across the turf — and then to walk through it in Twinmotion the way you walk through a city in GTA. ESD GTA 6 before GTA 6.
Approach
- Blender
- Twinmotion
- UVs
- RenderDoc
Had to be recognizably ESD, not generic-school-3D — every building roughly where it actually stands.
Field log
Day 1 — The plan
Wrote the workflow on one page before I opened anything: gather references, block out the geometry, refine and texture, export to Twinmotion, light it, plant trees. Six boxes, one arrow each.
[image: Project workflow flowchart in light blue rectangular boxes connected by dark gray arrows snaking top-left to bottom-right — Gathering references → 3D modeling, blocking → Refining and texturing → Export model into Twinmotion → Lighting in Twinmotion → Adding trees and foliage]
The whole summer in six boxes. Day 2 — Camera around campus
Walked the campus with a camera. Three reference shots stuck.
[image: Three real reference photos of the ESD campus — top-left a wide concrete pedestrian path leading toward brick school buildings with green trim; top-right a view from beneath a modern enclosed skybridge of steel and glass connecting two brick buildings; bottom-left an elevated wide shot of a playground with blue equipment, outdoor seating, and a prominent white building with a distinctive red multi-pitched roof]
The campus as it actually is, before any geometry exists. RenderDoc on Google Earth
Google Earth 3D renders the campus as real OpenGL geometry. RenderDoc is a free MIT-licensed graphics debugger — point it at the application, capture a single frame, walk away with the underlying mesh. One capture and I had a wireframe of the whole neighborhood: buildings, parking lots, the running track around the football field, the blue tennis courts.
[image: Google Earth high-angle 3D satellite view of the ESD campus and surrounding neighborhood — interconnected brick buildings, parking lots full of cars, a running track encompassing a green football field with EAGLES painted on it, blue tennis courts; in the bottom-right corner a screenshot of the RenderDoc graphics debugger interface showing technical data, a wireframe preview, and debugging menus mid-frame-capture]
One frame capture and the whole neighborhood arrives as real geometry. Block-out in Blender
Pulled the captured mesh into Blender and worked it as a flat untextured white mass. Massive campus, no detail. The pond was a depression in the ground plane.
[image: Blender viewport screenshot — massive untextured matte-white blocked-out 3D model of the ESD campus, geometry and layout established but no color or texture, the outline of a large pond visible as a depression in the flat ground plane]
Geometry first. Everything else later. First textures
Pixelated pass first. Flat green grass, solid brown roofs, white walls, EAGLES blocked out as white squares on green.
[image: Low-resolution pixelated Blender screenshot of the campus model with basic flat colors applied — solid green ground for grass, solid brown building roofs, white walls, the word EAGLES vaguely blocked out as white squares on the green football field]
First color pass. Crayon stage. Re-block
Stripped it back to white and reworked the geometry that the texture pass had exposed. The model is whatever shape you can read without color helping you out.
[image: Blender viewport again showing the campus model returned to a fully untextured matte-white state — re-blocking the geometry with the colored pass turned off]
Back to white. Read the shapes. Texturing pass — procedural + image
Real pass: procedural plus image-based. Darker shaded grass, patterned brown tile roofs, gray paved walkways, a bright blue pond where the depression used to be.
[image: Blender screenshot of the ESD campus model in the texturing phase — darker shaded green ground, patterned brown tile roofs, gray paved walkways and roads, the foreground pond filled with a bright solid blue material]
Procedural where it could be, image where it had to be. Twinmotion: lighting click
Exported the .fbx to Twinmotion. Same untextured white campus, suddenly standing under a real sky with real sun-cast shadows. Then a top-down blueprint view: clicked white-dot tree clusters along every walkway until the perimeter filled in.
[image: Two Twinmotion screenshots side by side — left, the untextured matte-white campus model imported into Twinmotion under a Twinmotion sky with basic sun lighting; right, a top-down blueprint-style view with a blue background and white outlines of the buildings, clusters of small white dots indicating where trees and foliage will be planted along walkways and the perimeter]
Untextured white plus a real sun. Then dots for trees. First ground-level render
Wide render from inside the model: playground with blue structures, real grass, planted trees, view down a grassy corridor toward the white church. Sharp realistic shadows. The campus walked through.
[image: Wide ground-level full-color Twinmotion render from inside the campus — playground with blue structures, realistic grass, planted trees, view down a grassy corridor toward the white church building, bright sunlight casting sharp realistic shadows]
First time the inside of the model felt like a place. The pavilion
Courtyard scene. Tiered stone fountain in the foreground, manicured lawn, dappled tree shadows on paved walkways, brick buildings forming the perimeter, clear blue sky. The shot the project was named for.
[image: Final ESD Pavilion render — modern geometric tiered light-stone water fountain in immediate foreground, manicured lawn beyond surrounded by wide paved walkways, large highly detailed trees casting dappled realistic shadows on grass and paths, brick buildings with large windows forming the perimeter of the courtyard, brightly lit by a simulated sun under a clear blue sky]
The pavilion shot.
From the gallery
[image: Realistic 3D render of the modern white church building with the distinctive red multi-pitched roof, viewed from low in the grass with blades of grass in the foreground]
[image: Heavily stylized 2D painterly render of figures in vintage clothing walking along a waterfront promenade — a different art style entirely from the rest of the campus work]
[image: Dramatic atmospheric 3D render looking out over the rooftops of the ESD campus model at sunset — vibrant pink, purple, and orange hues filling the sky, bright glowing light reflecting intensely off a red building roof in the foreground]
What I came back with
Photoreal campus, RenderDoc'd from Google Earth
Lesson from the terrain
Half the work was already sitting in someone else's GPU buffer. I never could've hand-modeled the whole neighborhood in a summer, but RenderDoc handed me the entire ESD campus as real geometry from a single Google Earth frame capture, and Blender and Twinmotion did the rest. And the gap between the flat-white block-out and the final courtyard render is almost entirely the renderer — Blender shows you what you built, Twinmotion shows you what it looks like.
Cross-links
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