Burj Khalifa

Burj Khalifa (Khalifa Tower) is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Known as the Burj Dubai prior to its inauguration the tower was renamed when Sheikh Khalifa, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, granted monetary aid and funding when the original developers experienced financial problems.

With 163 floors and a total height of 829.8m the Burj Khalifa has been the tallest structure and building in the world since its topping out in 2009, supplanting Taipei 101, the previous holder of that status.

The building was designed by a team led by Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the firm that designed the Sears Tower in Chicago, a previous record holder for the world’s tallest building.

The design is derived from Islamic architecture. As the tower rises from the flat desert base, there are 27 setbacks in a spiral pattern, decreasing the cross section of the tower as it rises and creating convenient outdoor terraces. These setbacks are arranged and aligned in a way that minimises vibration wind loading from eddy currents and vortices. At the top, the central core emerges and is sculpted to form a finishing spire.

At a total building weight of approximately 450,000 tonnes the Burj Khalifa’s construction used 330,000 cubic metres of concrete and 55,000 tonnes of steel rebar. The spire alone is composed of more than 4,000 tonnes of structural steel. The central pinnacle pipe weighs 350 tonnes and has a height of 200m. In addition, the external cladding system consists of 142,000 square metres of more than 26,000 reflective glass panels and aluminium.

IMPORTANT
This is a very big asset and as such has a high try count and large textures.

Its large size causes the LOD (Level of Detail) to appear sooner than on normal scale assets. To counter this and to stop it looking low quality the LOD textures are 1K which is much bigger than I would usually create. In addition, the LOD mesh uses 1.1K tris for the same reason.

To stop the LOD ‘kicking in’ as quickly I recommend adjusting the LOD distance with the Ultimate Level of Detail mod by boformer.

This asset was commissioned by Spannerific.

Burj Khalifa

Footprint
21 x 18 Units
Geometry
38.8K tris, 1.1K tris LOD
Textures
2048 x 2048, LOD 1024 x 1024

The asset can be found in the ‘Unique Buildings’ tab.

I’ve tried to make this asset as realistic as possible and therefore the geometry tri count is high and the textures large. All of the texture elements have been created specifically for this asset in order for full control over the final look.

Please try this asset out and if there are any problems let me know in the comments below.

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