I'm really excited as I start to dig in, getting ready to start some block outs since I have my mood boards/inspiration wall finished. I'm very much in love with skylines and silhouettes, so that's mainly what I'll be working towards. I am from a small town, and I remember the genuine awe and wonder that filled me when I saw my first big city. (Coming through the Fort Pitt tunnel into Pittsburgh) I'd like to capture that feeling and recreate it in the style of this challenge. Capturing the "alien-ness" of the city is really where I'll get to add fun details and bits of extra design. My main inspiration for my style and color pallets is Ralph McQuarrie and his work for the Star Wars films. By keeping similar silhouettes, but changing the details to fit this new world, I can be true to the design while adding my own personal touch.
First off, I started with some simple buildings, very basic primitives, stacked and arranged to mimic art-deco architecture. You can see the small curved piece on the right side, multiple buildings are created from this one piece being duplicated and re-arranged. These aren't entirely modular but many of these parts fit together and are used in more advanced buildings. I've broken down the most frequent forms and silhouettes from famous art-deco buildings and I'm using these parts and others (you'll see next post/update) to recreate them in my own vision for the challenge.
Since the scale of my render is a full skyline, I realized pretty quickly that I couldn't detail all the buildings by hand, even with a modular kit. So, I'm using greeble to help. With only a few different clicks and even just a rotation or two, one building can become many. I'll be filling out my city with buildings like these. These examples are targeting specific faces from the first building posted above. The greeble actually helps the silhouettes become a little more interesting but it doesn't harm the overall "ziggurat" form of most of the buildings.
Using the same pieces from before (and a few others, namely the arches and the fins) I made what I've come to call "demi-hero" assets, in that there will only be one or at /most/ three of these buildings, and they are teller so that they'll help form the skyscrapers of the skyline. They also have a bit more detail even before the greeble.
The entire city is a sort of futuristic/alien version of Earth’s early 1900’s, late Art Nouveau, Art Deco style of architecture, vehicle design and clothing style, but noticeably uh…….”different”. The alien technology looks to be extremely advanced.
I felt like a lot of others were leaving out something that felt "different." My approach was to try to think like these beings. They love the style and the culture and the art, but do they understand the functions and uses for everything? I doubt it. So I thought to myself, "what looks right, but also wrong at the same time?" I thought to the appliances, furniture, equipment, tools, and gadgets. I used these forms to base my buildings on, and you can see the distinct difference between the curved styles and the more angular ones. After seeing my references, it becomes easy to pick out how these influenced my buildings, especially the more simplistic towers. I loved how the shapes still worked, but they did feel different. They aren't as boxy and rigid as traditional buildings, and with the advanced technology and materials these beings have access to, creating such structures is easily within grasp. Angular inspiration
Love the look of these comments... I like the seriouscat comment ... I fully agree. Show some work and wrap it all up. I cant wait to see this with updates. Only 9 days left!
I've worked pretty hard this week and I have my scene all laid out. Any little holes in the composition will be fixed in the final comp, but I wanted to share my progress. I'm planning on having water to fill the mid-ground of the scene. Onto detailing the hero pieces with the awesome XMD brushes and then materials and lighting in UE4 to finish it up.
I liked what you said, Cat and Alex, so I scaled or moved the buildings around as needed to better match. Here's a Z-depth render of the city to get a little better feel for the volume of the city. (Plus I just think they look cool.)
I worked like crazy the past few days to make the deadline, and then we get an extension. I'm glad for it though, because I want to re-sculpt some details on my hero buildings (I textured using substance so swapping in the new highpoly and rebaking will make that a breeze), and I may even add a gargoyle/statue/building corner into the bottom right of the image to ground the view better as currently it's a bit bare. What do you think? I'm still figuring out the lighting tricks in UE4, but I'm happy with my progress. The colors are about right, as I always pictured a sunset scene. The saturation of the scene overall and especially the water will be changed. Also due to camera differences from 3dsMax>UE4, the right side of my scene looks a bit empty so I'll duplicate some buildings from the back and we'll have this looking alien-deco yet. Also planning on adding some fog to help with the depth/atmospherics/etc. Keep watching, I've got more on the way.
The being starts again, "I represent a group of concerned citizens who would see some," and it paused, resuming in a hushed tone ,"changes in this city. This world is long for revolution." David asked many questions and found the answers beguiling. He could not help himself but be drawn in by this creatures charisma, or maybe something more.
Replies
Capturing the "alien-ness" of the city is really where I'll get to add fun details and bits of extra design. My main inspiration for my style and color pallets is Ralph McQuarrie and his work for the Star Wars films. By keeping similar silhouettes, but changing the details to fit this new world, I can be true to the design while adding my own personal touch.
First off, I started with some simple buildings, very basic primitives, stacked and arranged to mimic art-deco architecture. You can see the small curved piece on the right side, multiple buildings are created from this one piece being duplicated and re-arranged. These aren't entirely modular but many of these parts fit together and are used in more advanced buildings. I've broken down the most frequent forms and silhouettes from famous art-deco buildings and I'm using these parts and others (you'll see next post/update) to recreate them in my own vision for the challenge.
I felt like a lot of others were leaving out something that felt "different." My approach was to try to think like these beings. They love the style and the culture and the art, but do they understand the functions and uses for everything? I doubt it. So I thought to myself, "what looks right, but also wrong at the same time?" I thought to the appliances, furniture, equipment, tools, and gadgets. I used these forms to base my buildings on, and you can see the distinct difference between the curved styles and the more angular ones. After seeing my references, it becomes easy to pick out how these influenced my buildings, especially the more simplistic towers. I loved how the shapes still worked, but they did feel different. They aren't as boxy and rigid as traditional buildings, and with the advanced technology and materials these beings have access to, creating such structures is easily within grasp.
Angular inspiration
Curved Inspiration
Story continues directly from after the prompt.
The being starts again, "I represent a group of concerned citizens who would see some," and it paused, resuming in a hushed tone ,"changes in this city. This world is long for revolution." David asked many questions and found the answers beguiling. He could not help himself but be drawn in by this creatures charisma, or maybe something more.