GNOMON - North Hollywood Campus

Back in 2021, it was decided that Gnomon was going to explore the idea of a new campus. Over the course of a few months, we visited many possible locations all over Los Angeles, from north Burbank to Culver City, but ultimately settled on North Hollywood. The NohoWest development complex was recently completed and offered a ton of amenities, while being centrally located; an important criteria for both our students and instructors.

Once negotiations had settled, we were set to build a 45,000 sqft campus across three floors with a blank slate. The space was completely empty with no walls, just columns every 25 feet and 20 foot high ceilings. I spent most of 2023 designing the entire campus in Maya & Unreal, from the floor plans (where walls go, classroom layouts, offices, lounges, etc), to the placement of every single print of student work, movie poster, light fixture, wall screens, and so on. Prior to my work in 3D, I did enlist the help of my friend Greg Downing to scan all of the old campus. Having accurate scans in Maya/Unreal at correct scale of all of our furniture, classrooms, sculptures, etc was a huge help for initial planning. I also brought on my friend Jonathan Berube who came up with some very cool design ideas for the outdoor patios and reception area, many of which made it to the final build.

I then supervised construction with the architects and primary contractor, Dempsey. Construction started in August of 2023 and completed in July of 2024. While a ton of work, it was a once in a lifetime experience for me. As someone who had designed Gnomon’s old campus, but gradually over 25 years, this was a daunting task. Doing something this big all at once was exciting and stressful but, ultimately, super rewarding. Seeing my renders become real was surreal. While in hindsight the experience was a blur of work, I am quite proud of the end result and happy that our staff, students and teachers have responded so positively to the move. We will always miss Television Center, our original home… a 100 year old studio lot that was full of character and history. But change is the way of things, and this one was necessary to support the needs of our community. I think it turned out pretty cool.

Below are the floorplans, many of the renders I produced in late 2022 as I wrapped up the design phase, shots of the site when we were scoping it out, then photos of construction and finally a few photos of the end result. :)

Floor and Lighting Plans

Working with MMA Architecture, the floorplans were developed collaboratively as we had to make sure that all of our existing computer labs would fit precisely and efficiently into their new rooms, while executing a new flow for the campus that took advantage of being able to start from a clean slate. For example, having the gallery next to reception, as opposed to a different building half a block away at our old campus.

We tackled the floorplans in 2D first and once I had them locked in, MMA built out the floorplans in 3D using AutoCAD. Luckily, MMA already had 3D CAD files for the NohoWest property which we could use as a starting point. We were then delivered files from AutoCAD for the building with all walls, windows and doors in place. I enlisted the help of Anton Napierala, Gnomon’s Games Lead, to convert those files into Maya/Unreal with better topology, UVs and model separation so that they would be easier to work with.

These floorplans also show the work I did designing the Lighting plan. This was a long process of determining light types, intensity and temperature, finding light fixtures that we would use, and then placing all of them in Maya. I used IES profiles for all light fixtures that had them available and ultimately ended up with 52 unique light fixtures. Top down lighting plans were then created in Maya, below, which were provided to the contractor, Dempsey Construction.

3D layout and design using Unreal, Twinmotion and Maya

The initial use of 3D was to confirm wall placements and flow once we had the AutoCAD file from MMA Architecture converted into game engine friendly geometry. I did this in Unreal Engine and Twinmotion as they provided a more intuitive way to virtually walk around. During this phase I was primarily adjusting wall and window locations, heights, and so on. Once these were final and approved by both MMA and engineers, I then moved on to lighting. This was done in Maya, with all rendering done with Redshift. While I had initially thought that maybe Unreal could be used, thanks to Lumen and Nanite, it quickly became clear that Maya would be more efficient. Ultimately, this was not just a layout / lighting task, but a lot of modeling, UVs and texturing would end up being part of the process. This did mean that I needed to decimate the millions of polygons worth of photogrammetry scans that I had from the old campus so that Maya could handle them (Unreal’s Nanite had no issue with them of course). ZBrush made that process pretty easy and I don’t recall it taking more than a day to process.