Tycom Reliance for Tyco International
Tyco International was committed to building a new fleet of transoceanic, cable-laying ships. The company was concerned about approaching potential customers and investors because of the long delay between creating the blueprints and finally launching the ships. Nick Rotondo was commissioned to create a photorealistic cutaway of the Reliance that would display the engines, spoils of fibre-optic cable and above-and-below deck equipment.
Nick used form•Z RenderZone, with its integrated LightWorks rendering engine, to create this virtual ship. First a 3D digital model was created which enabled detailed preliminary images to be provided. No element was overlooked - from the placement and pattern of the flags to the colour of the running lights. The most critical element was the creation of the ship's hull, which dictated the entire interior layout. As LightWorks is closely integrated with form•Z's model database, Nick had no problem in rendering the resulting model, even though it contained an extremely large number of polygons.
The end result is an illustration which uncovers much of the mystery of the cabling process and which provided a detailed description that was easily understood by potential investors, before the ship itself was completed. The final images were so realistic that they actually helped the designers and engineers to tweak and revise their construction plans, long before production was completed. The use of LightWorks helped the images to really come to life and added a greater level of photorealism that would not otherwise have been possible.
All images courtesy of Nick Rotondo.