Accelerating hotel design with CGI
Overview
Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG) wanted to accelerate their design process and increase sales. We built a CG pipeline to provide rapid digital prototyping, VR and AR review tools, brand microsites, and marketing materials.
My Contribution
I functioned as Art Director and Creative Director, leading a diverse team of 3D Artists. I also provided hands-on 3D and VFX expertise.
IHG’s Challenge
Designing hotels is a lengthy and complex process involving hundreds of moving pieces. Validating the designs and selling the vision is equally intricate.
Our Solution
We partner with IHG’s design teams and architects to visualize and rapidly evolve their new hotel designs in CG.
Designing a hotel
Forms develop first as simple white spaces. This created a flexible playground for quick design iteration. We generated hundreds of renderings exploring dozens of unique options. Virtual reality, with six degrees of freedom, allowed for fully immersive exploration of these spaces.
Virtual foam core
Physical foam core build-outs were augmented and replaced with our Virtual Reality sessions. Customers and executives toured the new designs digitally providing valuable feedback.
Creating a fully virtual hotel required digitizing every furnishing and fabric.
Rapid Prototyping
Each space is progressively refined until the final design takes shape.
The Results
Fully digital hotels with a library of ready-to-market virtual photography, all while launching new brands 40% faster than ever before.
Sharing the vision
Having a fully furnished virtual hotel was key to providing powerful marketing material. Not only did we provide a library of virtual photography, we created a whole host of tools to sell the vision. These efforts increased greatly early adoptions and hotel sales.
Virtual reality
We developed immersive VR experiences allowing users to “step inside” and fully explore each hotel.
Augmented reality
Our AR tools provided a unique way for users to interact and visualize the hotels within the real world.
Design sites
We launched microsites for each brand to host our 360° virtual walk-throughs, image / video galleries, and additional design documents. This created a simple one-stop-shop for new potential owners.
Live events
Our content has been critical to IHG’s external and internal events and communications.
We partnered with 7 of IHG’s mainstay brands, and empowered the design and launch of 2 new-to-market hotels.
Credits
All work was accomplished at TRICK 3D with incredibly talented teammates.
Artists
Ross Cantrell
Tim Spanjer
Jorge Gaspar
Nicole Taylor
Torey Haas
Johnathan Lanius
Leadership
Chad Eikhoff
Ross Cantrell
Fatimah Abdullah
Elliott Rothman
Stacy Shade
Patreece DeChambert
Laura Rea
Production
Fatimah Abdullah
Brandy Drew
Ethan Burnette
Kailin Melish
Patreece DeChambert
Axel Ordonez
Many thanks to the countless additional staff
and crew who were instrumental in everything we created.
