Hello viewers!
It's been a while since I updated
this blog due to my work on Fleet Calamity (which can be viewed here:
http://fleetcalamity.blogspot.com/) Fleet Calamity has been my main
focus on personal work, but as of late I decided to try some new things.
Lately
I played a game called 'Remember me' which was a fun sci-fi 'what if'
future game that I blazed through. While playing it I thought 'man it
would be fun to work on a project like this' so I decided to look up
some concept art for the game. After browsing through some pieces and
narrowing down the choices I landed on this piece.
Note - this art is NOT done by me.
This
piece I thought would be fun to model and would teach me a bunch of new
things in blender that I didn't know. For example neon lights, self
illuminating objects, bump maps, specular maps. plant life, depth
manipulation and more.
Now, I've done these
things in Maya and Max, but I never was put on a project to do them in
blender. Thus I decided now is the time to expand my knowledge!
First I modeled the scene.
This
was after the first couple of hours. I first blocked out the area with
cubes then I started modeling the individual store fronts and knick
nacks.
Once
I got the first few store fronts modeled out I began to play with
lighting. I needed to make sure the shadows on the ground were sharp to
match the concept art above. I also wanted to have the same reflections
as shown in the concept art, but I wasn't getting it in this render.
I
started adding a metal texuter to all the metal pieces. I watched a
tutorial on anisotropic material so I played around with that for a
couple of the pieces such as the coffee shop bracers. This was one of my
first experiments with materials besides Fleet Calamity.
Next
I wanted to give a marble texuter to the first store on the left. I
knew I could create it with simple material nodes, so I watched a
tutorial and after some tinkering I got something I'm happy with.
I
added lights to the right hand side, shrunk the coffee shop signs to
match the concept art and added hand made textures to the coffee shop,
menu sign, tattoo parlor and the street. I noticed the street is fairly
shiny from in the concept art, as if rain had recently passed. So I
began to work on making sure the my render is just as shiny and showed
the same reflections. In here it was lacking, but I knew what to aim
for.
Above I
bumped up the brightness of the sun, Made the street more shiny, played
with the windows again (still not getting the results I want) and added
more textures, signs and buildings.
In this final render I move the camera to match the concept art a bit better, added a few more textures, cleaned up the render, added items in the shops and started to texture them (although those textures are blown out because of the lighting.), worked on the 'sun' and added the hover text with my own little flare (such as the twitter and facebook icons).
Whats next?
I need to add more stuff in the shops to make them look like they actually are shops, not just empty rooms.
I need to play with the lighting of the two front buildings to give more of the effect from the original concept art.
I'll need to add a background image that looks more like the original piece.
I'll
need to tweek some textures to make them a bit more realistic and
believable - especially with the 'seau de boulons' building. Of course
I'll need to add textures to the buildings in back.
And finally, I need to add the plants and foliage from the concept art
