Fredrik Johnsson spent his childhood summers in Varberg, a small town on the Swedish west coast, and has lived there permanently for the past 14 years. As a land surveyor, he knows the geography of the city more intimately than most. Over the years, he’s moved from traditional surveying assignments such as creating maps of the area to visualization projects using drones, 3D, 360° imaging, and AR.
With travel restrictions putting a halt to holidays abroad last summer, Fredrik found himself with free time on his hands. He decided to take the opportunity to work on a personal project he’d had in mind for a while: a visualization to take you back 500 years, depicting Varberg as it would have looked in the Middle Ages.
The city of Varberg lies on the west coast of Sweden. Its position along a vast stretch of white sandy beach made this a popular bathing resort in the 19th century, but the city has had a far more turbulent history than the genteel bath houses would suggest. War, fires, and political conflicts have caused the city to move again and again.
Fredrik wanted to recreate the very first city that was founded around 1100 and abandoned in 1578. The only trace left of that first settlement today are the ruins of the old church. The project also had a practical purpose—Fredrik knew that a large visualization assignment awaited him at work in the autumn, and this animation would be the perfect opportunity to hone his Twinmotion skills.
Telling a story in archviz
What’s intriguing about Fredrik’s Varberg animation is its emotive quality—the sense of being there. That’s what sets Twinmotion apart from other rendering solutions: its power for storytelling. The tool’s innate potential for crafting narrative is built on its speed and ease of use. “The time from idea to finished product is very short,” says Fredrik. “It's so easy to make changes and test new ideas.”
Once the scene is looking just right, the software’s intuitive animation tools make it easy to craft the narrative with a compelling walkthrough. After that, it’s a case of adding the finishing touches, like music. “Somehow, it worked OK even for a beginner like myself and the video struck an emotional chord,” says Fredrik.
An ecosystem of real-time tools
The Varberg of today would probably be largely unrecognizable to one of the city’s residents from the Middle Ages. The city is set to change further still, with three major urban development projects planned for the coming years: an underground railroad, moving the harbor, and a new urban district called Västerport.
Town planners need a way to show politicians, officials, and residents how these construction projects will affect the city. More than this, they need a way to sell a vision of Varberg’s future; to tell its story.
The technology to achieve that is becoming ever-more sophisticated, opening up new and exciting avenues of possibility. “We did a large collection of geodata from aircraft last year where we covered the entire municipality of 900 square kilometers,” says Fredrik. “We collected 10 billion laser-scanned points and 120,000 oblique images that we can now use to build the municipality in 3D with terrain, buildings, and trees.”
You can see an example of this type of project in the video below, which shows how drone footage of a dyke under construction was used to create an animation in Twinmotion.