Cyber Punk Tokyo

biofrost

After jumping from project to project I finally decided to stick with something. I have been working on this off and on for about two weeks when I discovered my fatal flaw. My blockout's suck. When I started working on it I blocked out some general shapes of what I wanted and went straight into texturing and getting shaders set up in UDK way too fast. What I ended up with was a mess. Just blocking out that was not enough, I needed to decided where and what props I needed and needles to say I started over.

This is what I ended up with

its just a mess and I really learned my lesson for lack of planning.There is some good ideas here and I kept those but my eagerness to jump and get things textured right away bit me in the ass.

So I started over and kept everything a gray color so I can focus on composition(except the light posts, stairs and trash can)

For reference I was inspired by the map Deadlock from Blacklight. It has a nice near future tokyo with a blend of metal and sci-fi and older buildings and structures.





I still need more wires hanging from things and trash on the ground and some kind of railing so people don't fall off the upper ground area haha. So any crits on the composition so far would be wonderful. or any suggestions on more things to add please feel free!

I think once I get this blockout finished I should start on the lightmaps before I go into texturing the buildings.

biofrost

These are some of the images im using as a reference point for the mood and look I would like to go with.






As of right now im working on getting the lightmaps done and applying what textures I can reuse from my first attempt.

SaferDan

Yay for a giant ramen bowl! This is looking good!

With regards to your process, in the blockout you have now will they be final meshes? If so I assume you have mapped out texture sheets for them?

I look forward to more!

Jigsaw

Looks like a cool project, however if you're trying to create a "Tokyo" scene - even if fictional - I would suggest that you use some actual photographs of Tokyo as reference. The reference material you have looks appealing, but it doesn't look much like Tokyo.

Here's some random pictures of different parts of Tokyo I dug up with about 2 minutes of googling:
Shinjuku
Shinjuku/Kabuki-cho
Shibuya
Harajuku

Maybe you are deliberately going for a greyer, more desolate look, but the real Tokyo is a very vibrant place, and I think you could do well to incorporate more of that into your design. I would also recommend you do more research on elements like sidewalks, street signs, lightposts, dumpsters and whatnot, if you really want to sell it as Tokyo. If you simply want to make a generic futuristic looking city with Japanese-looking neon signs, that's cool. Blade Runner, to use an obvious example, looks amazing, but it also doesn't really look anything like Japan (nor is it supposed to). Personally I think it would be very awesome to see you push the Tokyo angle though, and make the details as accurate as you can (not without embellishing, of course), but that's just my two cents.

Regardless of where you're planning to take it I look forward to future updates.

biofrost

Thank for the reference Jigsaw! I am for sure keeping the vibrant look of Tokyo in my scene, in fact along with real world references I usually have Yakuza 4 running on my ps3 for reference too.

@SaferDan: Yeah most of those models are final meshes, I have some texture sheets doen but they still need some adjusting.

biofrost

Got some textures and messed around ab it with the lighting. Still not completly happy with the composition yet, I think the buildings are still a bit plain on the modeling side so ill just have to figure something out to do with them. (EDIT: I need to adjust that DOF)

and a dumpster

neverwander

You also might want to take a look at the Redlight District map from Neotokyo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6DYXdAbVyM

Its a free mod for the source engine, so as long as you have Half Life 2 on Steam you can download and install it. No servers are up cause the community dried up, but you should be able to start up a round on an empty map and explore.

http://neotokyohq.com/