Power block
3D · power-plant film · Alexey Sukhariev · Design engineer
An advertising film about combined-cycle power blocks — machinery no camera can usefully show. The client had no 3D and no drawings, only photographs, so every turbine, boiler, generator and transformer in the film was rebuilt from pictures. I did the modelling and the animation. My part of the film runs about two and a half minutes.
A film that has to explain a power station
The brief was an advertising film about combined-cycle and steam power blocks — the machinery almost nobody has seen and that no camera can usefully show: the hot path inside a gas turbine, the tube bundles stacked inside a heat-recovery boiler, the rotor inside a generator. The storyboard opens with a child building a power station out of toy blocks on the floor by a fireplace, and then hands the same act to the real thing: the block assembles itself piece by piece, and each machine is opened up in turn. That framing decided everything about the 3D. The models are not scenery around a voice-over — they are the explanation, which means they have to be right before they can be beautiful.
No CAD, no drawings, no internals
The client had no 3D of their own equipment and could not release drawings, so what arrived was pictures: a hall photograph with the machine circled by hand, casings sitting on their foundations, a general view with somebody’s marker on it. That is the entire brief for the geometry, and everything in the film was rebuilt from it. Where a part was visible it was matched against the photograph; where it was hidden — inside the compressor, inside the boiler — it was reasoned out from how the machine works and then checked against the parts that do show. It is also why every correction later cost a re-model rather than a parameter change.
Understanding the machine was the hard part
Two artists came off the project before it finished. Not because they could not model — because they could not hold the plant in their heads: which shaft turns what, why the exhaust goes into a boiler instead of straight up a stack, what a step-up transformer is doing at the end of the line. I stayed with the material until the whole chain made sense, and after that the modelling was ordinary work: photograph on the backdrop, geometry traced against it, part by part. On a subject like this the domain knowledge is the skill; the geometry follows from it.
The references were for a different machine
The most expensive part of the project was not a modelling mistake. More than once the reference we were handed turned out to belong to a different machine than the one the film was about — another turbine, another generation of equipment — and the work standing on it had to go back. Review arrived drawn straight onto the renders, in two hands at once: this is the wrong gas turbine, and the generators have to be sized against it. The version history is the honest record of that: fourteen versions of the master scene in January alone, and seventy-nine of the hub the models were exported through for retopology.
Volumes first, machines after
Because the layout kept moving, it was agreed on boxes at true scale before anything was detailed — the blockout on the left is a real deliverable, not a sketch. Sizes, distances and the relationship between the gas train, the boiler and the switchyard were signed off while they were still cheap to change. After that, detailing only ever added, and it never moved a machine that had already been approved.
A section only works if the inside is really built
The film cuts the machines open, so the interiors are not implied — they exist. Compressor and turbine stages on the shaft, the combustion path, the stacked heat-exchanger bundles inside the boiler, the rotor inside the generator casing. Colour carries the physics rather than decoration: hot gas and steam warm, feedwater cool, so a viewer with no engineering background can follow where the energy goes without a single label on screen.
The block builds itself in front of the viewer
The child’s toy blocks become the real station in one continuous shot: the switchyard first, then the steam turbine and its generator, then the boilers with their stacks, and the gas turbines last. Building the plant in the order power actually flows means the audience has learnt the layout before anybody explains it. Sixty-one objects carry animation across seventy-four actions — machines settling into place, rotors turning, the pipe runs drawing themselves between them.
What the scene actually weighs
The delivered scene renders 3,107,617 triangles across 209 meshes, dressed with 77 materials and 185 textures. Pipework is built on curves rather than tube meshes — 73 curve objects feeding a pipe collection of 178 — so a run can be rerouted without being rebuilt, which on a project where the layout moved this often paid for itself repeatedly. Lighting is twelve area lights with per-object light linking, so a machine can be lit for the shot it appears in without wrecking the frame next door. Rendered in Cycles at 1920×1080, thirty frames a second, AgX, with motion blur on; the shots I hold run out to frame 4,356 of the master timeline, about two and a half minutes of animation.
One block, end to end
Three gas turbines, each with its generator and its own heat-recovery boiler, feeding one steam turbine, with the whole output leaving through the step-up transformers. Everything in this frame was built from photographs over three months.
What is shown here
The finished film — edit, voice-over, the client’s branding — belongs to the client and is not published, and the client is not named. Everything on this page is my own output from the project: renders straight out of the scene, animation samples, the working file and the review artefacts. I did the modelling and the animation; the film also had an illustrator, an editor, a producer and a creative director.
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