National Geogaphic Magazine
Clean Energy In A Coal Mine
Ixtract's new graphic for the current 2018/07 issue of of National Geographic magazine shows a visualization of a new energy concept in Germany. The former coal-mine Franz-Haniel should be transformed into a renewable power plant, generating energy with renewable energies combined with a water storage power plant - below the surface! This promising idea is shon in the spread for which ixtract created the 3D artwork.
The whole spread was designed and planned by Jason Treat from NGM staff.
The whole spread at a glance. The challenge was to create an exact copy of Franz-Haniel area and create an artistic but easy to understand rendering.
We had to deal with really intense amounts of data, which had to be transformed from a point cloud to a easy to handle polygon model.
This is the Franz-Haniel area, whith it's distinctive slag heap.
The real size of the slag heap compared to the shaft tower of Franz-Haniel.
First idea was to generate a "realistic" mapping, but we soon realized this approach to be much to detailed and so we skipped this idea quickly.
To generate a nice looking forest, we created a very unique and innovative way to visualise trees. The basic idea was to apply a displacement on a surface which would be extruded by a second displacement, using a noise pattern shading. Here you can see the three major steps, which we finally used to plant our 3D model.
The final rendering of the spread.
