The Rotterdam Market Hall, scheduled to open this October, will be the first open-concept food market in the Netherlands. The building is a horseshoe-shaped arch with a one of a kind ceiling that has been called the "Sistine Chapel of Rotterdam". With the help of Wasatch SoftRIP, TS Visuals took on printing the artwork for this spectacular ceiling.

Sistine Chapel of Rotterdam

The Rotterdam Market will feature unique fresh produce stands, food markets, cafés, a cooking school, and over 200 apartments. The 11,000 square meter piece of art will cover the unique arch-shaped ceiling and will be visible throughout the entire market. TS Visuals teamed up with Dutch artist, Arno Coenen, for the artwork, 'Horn of Plenty', which gives off an illusion that one is looking through the hall to heaven with produce and flowers descending to earth.

Creating a masterpiece this size is no easy task. The hall's ceiling was put together with a series of sublimated metal panels. The metal panels and coating were designed by TS Visuals. Each panel is lightweight and bendable with a high gloss coating that has anti-graffiti properties and is scratch resistant. For the hall, the metal panels were perforated for sound-dampening properties. A total of 4,000 panels were sublimated, each with a unique high-resolution image. Many panels were bent to accommodate the arch of the hall, giving an almost 3D effect to the art.

Color Consistency

With a project this size, it is crucial that TS Visuals was able to achieve color consistency with every panel they sublimated. Wasatch SoftRIP's color management features gave them the ability to achieve this. With SoftRIP's Color Atlas Generator and Spot Color Replacement, TS Visuals was able to match spot colors and easily reproduce the desired color on the metal panels. The end result is accurate, high quality color. "SoftRIP is reliable and gave us the tools we needed to print the desired color every time with no troubles," says Vincent Post, Commercial Advisor for TS Visuals.

Efficient Workflow

Using SoftRIP's tiling tools, TS Visuals was able to easily divide the oversized artwork for printing on the individual metal panels. After the selected artwork is tiled, Vincent used SoftRIP's Smart Nesting tools to maximize the print layout of the tiled image. And by adding crop marks and annotations to all tiled images, they were able to save time and avoid possible confusion when transferring the image. "The tiling and nesting features in SoftRIP saved us a lot of time and is so simple to use," says Vincent.