>> As suggested, my name's Aaron Perry.
I work for Allford Hall Monaghan Morris --
AHMM. We're an architecture practice,
and I look after all things digital design.
What I want to try and share with you is,
coming back to one of the slides Ken showed earlier,
that spectrum of what we can touch,
in terms of architecture and that life cycle,
and how that's been evolved through the last few years.
Just one slide on us as a practice --
we are an architecture practice, about 530 people or so.
We have delivered many projects
in the City of London and elsewhere.
I guess the kind of key thing to suggest is,
because we're an architecture practice
that works from the very beginning,
right the way through to construction
and handover to clients,
we have a unique opportunity to interact with Unreal
at all different parts of that process.
As an architecture practice,
we do actually have in-house visualizers,
who are responsible for putting together a lot of the media
that you're about to see on the next few slides,
but to kind of think about that life cycle
in terms of very simplistic sections.
So convincing the big idea, refining that big idea
as a client's brief becomes more developed,
demonstrating to that client
exactly what they're going to get,
and then being able to demonstrate that further
and proving our capabilities to future clients
and in bids and competitions.
Now whilst it's easy for me to present in this linear fashion,
in terms of chronological order, we're kind of new-ish to Unreal.
We started picking it up in 2016,
and sort of jumped around a little bit
in terms of this linear life cycle.
But to keep it simple, I'm going to start at the very beginning
and talk about convincing the big idea.
Now the project I'm going to use to try and demonstrate this
is a project we've been
assisting Great Portland Estates on,
and helping them review the acquisition
of a very sensitive and high-profile site,
directly opposite St. Paul's, the BT Center.
And this building is essentially an office
building with some retail, but it's this sensitive context.
And it's the design iteration
that led us into the root of Unreal,
and that ability to enhance public realm
and align with the City of London policies
on enhanced public realm and infrastructure,
and network road layouts, et cetera.
But why did we explicitly say Unreal?
Well, essentially, we had a lot of confidence
from other Projects
that we had been doing in Unreal.
We took an educated guess that we were pretty confident
in turning that scheme around in quite quick succession,
being able to keep up with the rate of change
and flux the client was putting towards us,
and also that we were facing
from different stakeholders in the project.
The probably single most important thing for us
was this early ability to test massing.
And that sensitive context being in the Unreal environment
as well was just such a fundamental thing for us.
We were able to establish key views,
which is very important
when you're trying to build anything next to St. Paul's,
and we were able to very quickly switch
between the existing condition and any proposals
that we were suggesting in context.
And as part of this client's well-being agenda,
we had the ability in Unreal
to bring through realistic flora and fauna,
people, traffic -- all of those kind of things that,
in a traditional workflow of static images
and traditional ways of us producing visualizations,
just would not necessarily have been possible.
And it wasn't necessarily the big building side.
It was also at the macro level.
So we were able to have conversations with our client,
whether it was CLT versus steel frame,
all in that same asset,
all in that same digital model.
Importantly as well, we were able to have the conversation
and go through that journey of walking to the building,
into the building, through the building,
into the key spaces and very quickly iterate.
So as core designs were changing,
we could have all of this information updated.
We also had the opportunity to experiment with materiality,
colors, panels, glazing, facades --
again updating those key images
in a matter of hours as opposed to days,
as changes were made to the project.
And I think finally, for this project specifically,
it was that ability to have one single digital media
for all reasons,
for that scalability of having one single file
for all different kinds of journeys
with all different stakeholders.
Moving a little bit further into that life cycle,
and beyond the kind of early stage stuff,
how do we take that a little bit further
once we have a little bit more of a brief?
Now this was actually one of our first Projects
in terms of our use of Unreal, and it started with a visualizer
having a little bit of capacity to test and to innovate.
Now the deliverable was the same as it always
had traditionally been; it was static images.
And we were able to get some great results at that time.
But of course, what changes is,
you have much more capability with Unreal.
So very quickly, static images became more than that.
Now the project used in this example was a
[INAUDIBLE] competition bid that we won back in 2016
for the Alder Hey Child Bereavement Center.
The building itself is an extension to the Alder
Hey Hospice Children's Hospital in Liverpool,
and is essentially a facility for counselors
to provide support and bereavement counseling
to anybody suffering from the loss of a child.
Now again, static images moved quite quickly into video
and to animation, and we built a range of different clips
for all different use cases. We started doing VR critiques
and design studies with Paul Monaghan,
one of our design directors,
walking around that building and experienced
what it would be like.
Of course, when you take together
all of those static images,
those videos, those assets, those VR --
all of a sudden we offered something better to our client.
We were able to give them a whole host of Assets
to help them with fundraising. And on a project like this,
that was what helped to get off the ground.
I'm pleased to say that last week,
when it was a little bit sunnier,
the roof just went on,
so it's great to see that this project has really progressed.
Now looking a little bit forward in that life cycle,
but specifically in terms of this project,
we also had a fantastic opportunity
to spend the time with the counselors.
So these are the people that will be delivering
the services in this building.
And that great opportunity came when they said,
we just don't really understand floor plans
or sections or images,
and we had an amazing opportunity
to reuse that data set,
that Unreal model that we had been producing,
to help them have conversations around fit-out and furniture,
taking them on the journey from the front door
to where they'll sit, and have what is, frankly,
a devastating private phone call with someone,
and how can we understand what that will be like in that room
and in that space,
rather than perhaps just looking at a mood board
of different types of furniture.
So that helps me nicely start to get into this idea
of demonstrating what that building is going to be like
as you start to move into it. In this example,
I can talk about a project we've done with Derwent,
who is one of our longstanding clients.
It all started with us doing some design work
on the building that we rent from --
they're our landlord from our main office.
They sent us a really interesting proposal
at the end of that session saying,
could you provide us with all of the marketing material
for one of our biggest projects in the office
that we were working on with them at the time?
Now that project is Soho Place. You may have just started
to see some steel coming out of the ground.
But Soho Place is a series of two buildings,
predominantly office,
about 200,000 square feet of office in Central London,
directly located
on top of Tottenham Court Road tube station
and the brand new Crossrail station to the busiest
that will be on the network.
There's a public realm in the middle, which is great.
And the final challenge there is,
as you can see in this image,
the extract from the Crossrail station
has a series of fans on top --
and this is a good bit of trivia which I'll share with you --
which make so much noise,
it's louder than a Boeing 747 taking off.
And we thought it was a really good idea to put a theater,
the Astoria Theater that was on the site previously,
pretty much on top of that box, in a box for acoustics.
And it was a really technical project,
a really technical challenge.
And what I love most about being able to then
tell that marketing story for the client is
that the architects would get to control
that from start to finish,
which is not typically something we get an opportunity to do.
So we had to create a revolving workflow,
a revolving loop workflow,
from the design models that were being produced in Revit
and being treated and updated,
right the way through to the visualizer's Assets in 3ds Max
and through Datasmith and into Unreal.
Now that, at first, was a bit of a challenge.
We didn't really have a brief from our client,
so we were experimenting with ideas around VR
and walking through the building,
fixed cameras on tracks moving around
and using physical controllers --
and there was kind of debate with the marketing agents
about how was the best way to effectively
share that with perspective tenants?
The point was, we had utter confidence,
based on our use with Unreal,
that whatever those deliverables would eventually be,
we knew we could achieve them with Unreal.
So some of the end results were some videos and static images.
Some of the videos were shown on 4K,
two-story-high projections, laser projectors,
the same ones you get in your cinemas.
Custom apps running on 4K touch screens --
and it was a really interesting opportunity for us,
as architects, who'd never done any of this stuff before.
Now to give you a bit of a tease,
I've just taken some of the video to share with you.
Again, these are the Projects --
amazing work done by the team that put these together --
I know that's very biased to say,
but we'd never done anything like this before,
so we're very proud of that.
But we were able to work with the marketing agents
to basically tell different stories.
Now one of the primary stories they wanted us to share
was that journey from platform to desk.
Given the location of the building,
that's a big selling point, of course,
and that's something they wanted to try and tell.
So we were moving these cameras around two
or three times a week,
but it was no extra effort from us.
There was no going back to the beginning
and starting all over again.
We got to tell the journey of moving
through these glaze lift corridors,
right the way up through the building.
Different tenants had different ideas
about what they wanted to do with their spaces,
whether it's just a standard fit-out,
professional, creative layouts --
we could manage design options in that same file
without having to redo anything.
And whilst we focused on the macro detail of the building,
we were also able to tell a bigger story
about the location of the building to the city --
only achievable in Unreal.
In terms of the application, and again, we're architects,
we've kind of never done this before --
a custom app was built.
And it was about being able to control the information.
So the tenants were really interested
in being able to kind of move backwards and forwards
in terms of what we were sharing.
So we were able to demonstrate key spaces,
we were able to move the video back and forward.
Because it was a touch screen,
we were able to use the panoramics
so the clients and tenants could actually move around
and have discussion about space.
And compared to your standard marketing brochure,
it was a real eye-opener for the client,
and allowed us to build a much more deeper
and rich relationship with Derwent,
the client on this project.
Which kind of nicely takes me to this next bit.
How do other clients understand, beyond Derwent,
what we are possibly capable of?
And that's where it comes about being able
to prove our capabilities.
Now traditionally, we've done that using static images;
one of our directors would do a series of slide shows
on presentations
based on some drawings or some images, and that's great.
But it was always missing something.
It was always missing that ability for us
to talk about that building in context to its neighbor,
all the surrounding area.
It didn't quite give us the ability
to jump from one side of town to the other.
So we've recently embarked on a project.
We've limited it in this clip to Old Street Clerkenwell
Faringdon,
and we're playing around with the idea of bringing
in all of our mapping data into a single Unreal project.
Some of the graphics and user interface
we're playing around with,
in terms of buildings we've worked on
or are currently developing,
right the way through to actually physically loading
in the actual buildings for The Bower
and the White Collar Factor, which is right on Old Street.
We can jump from one side of London to the other.
We can go down to the macro level
of looking at a lobby
or looking at a core design or facade,
and you can analyze this building against others.
We can build animations, we can build parts of user interface.
And this is something we'll continue to develop
over the next two years.
But I think that's a great way of kind of closing that loop.
It's the ability to then show to new clients,
where we're trying to convince them of the big idea,
based on proving to them what we are capable of already.
And for us, that's all of our benefits
that we're taking away from Unreal;
that ability of changing our aspirations
as we started using it.
It started with a couple of videos and a couple of clips,
and we don't really know where the limitation is at this point.
We want to keep pushing ourselves.
We have that increased confidence.
We have amazing value and return on investment of the time
and efforts we've put into this process,
and fundamentally changing our business model.
We're able to offer things
we were never able to do previously.
And that's such an impressive way for us
to talk back with our clients and demonstrate our competency.
Thank you very much for listening.
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