Radio City

  
Radio City - NBC Studios
Sunset and Vine, Hollywood CA


    I started building this one when I decided to do this blog. I wanted another building to post, and this was one I had been planning to do for a while. Yes, it's another radio station, but that is coincidental. What attracted me to this building, is the same that I felt about the KFI studios. During the 30's and 40's, Los Angeles began to hit it's stride. Thanks largely to Hollywood becoming the new entertainment epicenter with it's movie productions. Before TV became the standard in the 50's, radio was king. And Sunset and Vine was the epicenter of the radio industry, with Tom Breneman's "Breakfast In Hollywood" broadcasting live from his restaurant across Vine St. ABC also had a studio on Vine, while CBS set up shop down the block at Columbia Square. South on Vine had the Don Lee Mutual broadcast building, which still survives today.

   This coincides with the era of streamline modern architecture. This building was designed by John C. Austin. He also designed many other L.A. landmarks such as City Hall, Grauman's Chinese Theater and the Shrine Auditorium. Along with Morgan, Walls & Clements and  Welton Becket, they defined the classic look of the city at that time. Back then, the city had it's own unique vibe. It's the look you think of when you see old film noir detective movies.

Since this model is a fresh work in progress, i'd like to show how a build progresses.

During a build, I will do numerous test renders, to check how the model looks in an environment. This first image is the first test I did. The RCA logo and NBC type were imported into Cheetah3D as .svg files, which can be created in Adobe Illustrator with .eps files.

Buildings are a lot easier to model than cars. I started off with a basic box and added details to it. Then I copied and pasted the first building, to create the other two. A flattened box creates the awning.

Same angle, but now rendered with radiosity and hdri. Hdri uses hi-def photo light information, to recreate it's environment in 3D renders. Radiosity adds realistic shadows. You can see the difference from the previous render.

The planters shown here were a lot easier to make than I thought they would be. They were built from a tube and a box primitive shape, then I used a symmetrical modifier, so both sides would match. Then good ol' copy and paste. If only real construction were this easy.

More details added. The windows were built from elongated boxes with an array. This automatically duplicates your object, as many time as you want, evenly distributed.

This is what the windows look like without the building.
Once again, copy and paste are my friends. Twice for one side, then the whole thing once for the other side.




I use google earth and google maps for a template for the layout. Google earth has a neat feature that lets you go back in time and view old aerial data, if it's available for the area you need. Very helpful for referencing buildings that have been deleted from the face of the earth. This is the NBC studios top view in 1954 from the website http://www.historicaerials.com/

   This is the current state of the model. I've started modeling the
west/north/south sides of the building. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the north side actually looks like. The only side that got photographed was the iconic Sunset and Vine corner. I guess that just goes with trying to model things that don't exist anymore.

The dark side of the moon. This is my best guess at how the north and east side of the building were configured. 
Stanley Kelton informed me that a model of the building exists in a radio museum that is underneath the bank that was built on this site.

Unfortunately, a fire and the resulting litigation has closed the museum to the public for the time being. Maybe someday i'll be able to view it in person after they get everything sorted out.
  


Here is a shot of the back windows. I'm going to assume that the windows were similar on the wall adjoining them.

Also visible here is "Manny". I use him to scale things to a human proportion. You'll see him pop up now and then in my renders.

Bob Thomas is really popular on this street.

I was having problems getting the textures to align properly to the block. Thanks to Frank Beckmann over at the C3D forums for showing me the curb. I've used his tip here and it worked great. Frank is usually the first person to offer help over there and has helped me out more than once on my models.

More renders. I'm using a car in this one to check the scaling. Note the curb looks too high.

Added side trim to the studio buildings (it's the vent looking thingys near the top corners). This motif is also going to be used below the ledge by the doorways.

East side building signage. I still need to work out the best way to light up these signs for night renders.

Also started work on the main lobby. I only have reference photos for this part of the interior. It's just as well since this is a huge complex and doing an entire interior, like on the KFI project, would be daunting.


A main feature of the lobby, is a giant mural above the reception desk. I was able to take this from one of the reference photos. Not sure what the colors were on it, so it's black and white for now. To me it looks like a buff Charlie Chaplin in a gangsta rap outfit holding a radio.

 Stay tuned for updates.......