A world Underground – Visualized

The Palmaz Winery is a flawlessly engineered labyrinth of cave tunnels burrowed deep inside Mt George created for the single purpose of making a great wine.  It’s complex structure spans over 100,000 square feet, 18 stories underground and nearly 3 city blocks deep.  Understanding it’s overall architecture is quite challenging even for those who visit in person much less those who visit the website.  The solution was to take the CAD drawings from the engineering team and recreate the facility and mountain in 3D.  Over the years, with the help of brilliant 3D render artist Lance Hitchings, the models have become more and more life-like.

Lance’s latest animation was started on September 28th, 2015 and took 14 months to create.  There are more than 250 shaders used in the scene, with over 345 individual textures.  Of those textures, 140 were created by hand such as the stone work on the exterior of the winery.  The terrain was modeled using a sophisticated LIDAR scan, accurate to 1 meter.  The winery, cave system, and terrain are made up of 591 objects and 445,520 polygons.  However most complex is the vegetation, made up of over 685,000 individual plants which sport a whopping 3 billion polygons.  Of the 685,000 plants almost 3,500 were placed in the scene by hand accurately representing species correct vegetation around the winery and vineyards.  The animation was rendered at Google’s sophisticated cloud based render farm taking just over 336 hours to complete.  Lance consumed over 325 gallons of coffee during the making of the animation.  We believe he has since switched to Palmaz Cabernet.

After the video below, visit the gallery to see the evolution of Lance’s cutting-edge Palmaz Winery renders over the last 10 years.  We’d like to thank Lance for his incredible work and dedication to helping us share Palmaz Vineyard’s world underground.