ClearChannel: 3D Journey


ClearChannel is a company that makes advertisement boards you see everywhere. Since they would be the providers of the boards in Antwerp Central Station, they asked us to make a tool for them which they could use to give the advertisers a preview of how their ad will look in the environment.




For this project we worked in a team of 3 artists and 2 programmers. The artists being David Meszaros, Ilja Wijnker and Filip Hajek. The programmers were Kristof Dedeurwaerder and me.

The artists were tasked with making the beautiful environment of Antwerp Central Station. While we, the programmers, were tasked with making a tool based on one of their older tools to make it easy for them to edit the adboards present in the level as well as a crowd simulator to breathe more life into it.
The project was done in Unreal Engine 4, with the vast majority of programming being in C++, only using Blueprints here and there.
We divided the programming tasks, so I did the majority of the UI stuff while Kristof did the crowd simulation and player movement. Of course, we also went into each other's code to help out when either of us got stuck on a bug or wasn't sure how to write a feature. This sort of division of tasks but still close collaboration made for a great teamwork system in the group that worked really well.

render of antwerp central station



The tool we made has a lot of functionality to make it easy for ClearChannel to place down advertisements in their boards and later showcase them to their clients. Features of the tool include:

-An image manager menu.
-A Save and Load system.
-A menu with buttons that will teleport you to the corresponding board.
-Path guided movement for the player menu with buttons that will put you on the corresponding path
-Buttons to toggle free camera on those paths and being locked to the path or having free movement.
-The option to change to a Day or Night version of the level.
-Extra options like showing the distances between the player and each advertisement board, as well as saving a screenshot.
-A toggle-able crowd simulator

the tools user interface


The image manager was one of the main things I made and the thing I spend the most time on. In this menu the user can choose to upload an image of their choice, which will then show up in the menu with the thumbnail and name. The user can choose to change the image's name in here or remove the image from the menu.

However, the main functionality is being able to drag an image from it, towards an advertisement board inside of the level. The image will then appear on there.

loading in an image and dragging it onto an adboard removing and renaming an image in the menu



Another useful thing in this tool is the ability to save and load presets. When you have filled in all advertisement boards in the level that you wish to display to your client, you can press the save button and choose a name for your preset. It will then appear in the menu to be loaded up afterwards when you want to show it. This will save all the advertisements you've placed on the boards.

The switching from day and night works the same way, since the day and night lighting are done in different but identical maps. When you press the button to switch to night for example, it will save your current ads you've placed and then load them again when loading up the different map.

loading in an image and dragging it onto an adboard and saving loading in an image and dragging it onto an adboard and loading