The World Expo 2025 opened on April 2025 in Osaka
170 pavillions were built to promote countries’s culture and technologies around the theme “Future society”. Our client was in charge of designing and installing the Saudi Arabia pavilion.
One room in particular has needed our effort: The gallery dedicated to the fauna and flora of Saudi Arabia. The exhibition uses MDF boards, which are carved to reveal key elements. Some boards are then backlit to reveal motifs in a bas-relief style.
Starting with the sea microcosm, our client provided beautiful 2D illustrations.
We took those, vectorised them and modelled them in a bas-relief style, respecting precisely the depth and resolution of what the 2D carving machine can achieve.
We used a mixture of extruded splines to control the overall shape and displacement maps to add extra tiny details.
The 2nd exhibition focused on Corals. It displays a full-height wall made with a mosaic of 3D-printed corals.
Again, knowing the specs of the 3D-printed machine was key to ensuring a successful print session.
Those organic shapes allowed us to boot Zbrush, and pass down the final geometry back to Blender for a final geometry check and .stl export.
Lastly, we worked on a display of the different types of raw stones found in Saudi Arabia. Real samples will be fixed into a panel, allowing visitors to touch them and learn about where they can be found and how they are being used in construction.
Our work on those stones was used during the preproduction stage to visualise how the exhibit would look and sign off on the layout before building it in real life.
In a world that has become increasingly digital, having 3D assets that can be experienced physically is satisfying.
The user experience is richer than that of all digital content.
CoCollective has worked on museums, sales suites, and exhibition stands. Our content has been 3D printed, projected on 8m high LED walls, interactively controlled (digital twin), or projected in 360 on the Las Vegas sphere.
