BCA Miniature Buildings

This is a project that we work with Make Studio, a highly innovative company in Singapore. Make Studio is working on the interactive media for a exhibition of BCA Singapore to showcase the new building or construction technologies that have been used in Singapore.

Our role on this project is to provide 3D modeling of 5 miniature buildings and full colour 3D printing service, the 3D printed miniature buildings will be used as a totem for the interactive media, when the visitors put any of the miniature building on the screen, the information of the building will be shown right away beside it, visitors can then interact with the information pop out beside it.

The Challenge begin

How to interpret the actual buildings to the miniature building is something that we have to look into it. When the time we working on this project, some of the building were still under construction, reference that can be found online are very limited. There are also restrictions when come to 3D printing like the minimum thickness etc. So we decided to make the miniature buildings slightly cartoonish and add in a little bit of artist impression.

The miniature buildings in this project were printed with our full colour sandstone printer Zprinter 650. The reason of using it is because we have to produce it in a very tight timeline, it can print all 6 sets miniature building at one go, no need to remove support material, the colours are printed directly from the printer, it can cut down a lot of time on painting.

The entire process started from 3D modeling –> amendment on the modeling –> test print –> amendment and ajustment –> printing 6 sets of the miniature –> post processing. When they are done, designer at Make Studio will fix them on an acrylic base.

5 of the buildings that in this project are:

  1. NTU Sports Hall
  2. The Panorama Condominium
  3. Crowne Plaza
  4. CapitaGreen
  5. Yishun Community Hospital

The reference of those buildings are limited, that increase the difficulties on the 3D modeling process. Due to the totem size constraint, we have crop off some parts on some of the buildings, so that every totem can be in similar size. We also simplify the them to reduce the tiny intricate details on the actual building, so that it can be printed with the 3D printer.

Here you go, we manage to complete all 6 sets of the 5 miniature buildings within timeline given.

Great thanks to the creative team at Make Studio for inviting us to join such interesting project.