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Inside the University of Virginia's Athletics Video Services Department
11/21/2007
For Elvgren, intimate familiarity with JPJ began several years ago, when the arena was little more than plans on paper. Tasked with creating a 3D visualization of the entire arena for prospective donors, Elvgren soon found himself in unfamiliar territory. Not only had he not done an architectural project on the scale of JPJ before, it was the first time Elvgren found himself working closely with actual architects.
"What I found out through this whole process," Elvgren recalled, "is that [the architects] constantly change the design and the look--what the chairs are going to look like, what the carpet is going to look like--and the animator is often times the last one to know when changes are made."
But after more than a year of modeling, surfacing, and lighting the virtual arena to accurately reflect the ever-changing interior (and with a little help from a LightWave instancing plugin to handle the 15,000+ seats), the physically-accurate visualization was finally ready. The model was then converted to 3D Studio Max format and transferred to the Seats 3D company, where it is still used today to visualize seat locations.
Digital Signage
As ground was broken and construction begun, it was clear that video needed to take center stage, not only for events taking part inside the arena, but for many of the 25 men's and women's varsity sports at UVA.
Consequently, the home of AVS had to function as both the nerve center during home basketball games and the video production facility for many Cavalier sports. As such, the department wanted to make sure they got their facilities right, and for that they needed some additional perspective. Since the John Paul Jones Arena shared one of the architects that worked on the University of Maryland's Comcast Center, it turned out that the two buildings also shared similar internal features, so a road trip to chat up both the university's production staff, as well as ESPN engineers, was in order.
"We went up to the University of Maryland for one of the games, and we talked about what [they] like about the building--and what could have been done better--so we could avoid some of the up-front planning issues," Elvgren said. NBA arenas also provided some guidance for the LED signage and video boards AVS provided content for. Venues such as Dallas' American Airlines Center and San Antonio's AT&T Center were good test cases for what the signs and boards could add to the game atmosphere, with the San Antonio arena being particularly helpful owing to its smaller-town, almost collegiate feel. In the end, JPJ sports LED signs covering nearly the entire circumference of the arena's bowl, as well as the concourse and vomitory entrances, in addition to a two-ring, 12-screen (eight lower and four upper) main video board to display live action and stat data.
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