The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is the British intelligence agency responsible for providing signals intelligence and information assurance to the British government and armed forces. It operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence Committee alongside the Security Service (MI5), the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Defence Intelligence.
When GCHQ hit the headlines across the world for cyber security and terrorism concerns in 2015, I spotted a photo of the building on a BBC website and felt that it looked so alien in its surroundings. I made the decision, to gather more practical experience of large-scale scenes, to recreate this building and its surroundings in 3D and make a short film to show this. It was the largest scenario I have done, and was a very challenging project which allowed me to experiment, make progress and improve my professional skills. I hope you enjoy this piece of work.
The following pictures show some of the key techniques and steps involved in this project. The short video with breakdown, which is available at the top of this page, also provides a brief outline.
Reference
Normally, studying references is one of the first things to do in CG production. However, maybe because GCHQ is a highly classified facility, the information on the Internet was really limited. I had to create some details based on my understanding and imagination of the building, but basically they all followed the same pattern and style, and conformed to reality.
Modeling
As the pictures and video show, I have done a lot of work on the GCHQ building due to the ulterior reason that I may create some explosion shots of the building in the future. There were many ways to make an explosion shot, but regarding the difficulty of getting the real footage of this site, a detailed model was one of the more feasible solutions for this project. In addition, creating the structure of this building as close to reality as possible can help with simulation work at a certain level.
The communities around GCHQ
There were hundreds of houses with different features around GCHQ, and it was unrealistic to model every single one of them. Luckily, the architectural styles in each of the communities do not vary widely, which allowed me to create some basic modules and assemble them accordingly, then finally apply only a few extra editings to create a variety of units.
Vehicles
Some very basic low-poly vehicles were created, then the colour of the textures were modified. In this way, from a distance, it looked like there were many different types of vehicles in the scene. The movement of these vehicles was applied according to the areas where they were: highway / roundabout / residential areas, etc.
Spreading greenery
When all the above work was done, trees and textures were placed and applied. There was a lot of texture editing work here, especially the texture of the terrain.
