Since there is a theme park in the center of the mall with several attractions we decided to start construction of the mall at this location with the placement of an oversized figure of Snoopy.

Starting from this figure a roller coaster is assembled. The camera follows its construction to the shopping area of the mall.

The mall is being constructed in two steps. First a wireframe becomes visible followed by ground and wall elements. Thus the mall is assembled from over 400.000 single elements. Both generation of the wireframe and animation of the building's elements were realized using prorietary plug-ins, custom built or extended for this project.

The whole scene was rendered with Mental Ray, dividing the scene up into 12 layers and four additional separate render passes for the building. Otherwise even Mental Ray would have been hopelessly overstrained when using raytrace shadows and reflections.

Additional components such as pillars, doors, windows and rails were added using keyframe animation right after the prodecural animation was finished, using some scripts to ease this process to some degree.

In Digital Fusion we finally combined all layer and applied final color grading, glow effects and depth of field.