Hello! This is coming to you late, yet again (I should really change the title of this series… ‘One of One: When I feel like it’?). But, as ever, that doesn’t mean I’ve been sitting idle whilst you weep over an empty blog post; in fact, I’ve been rather busy!
So, our city is really coming together, and I’m happy to say that reactions from people have been more than complimentary, thus far. With a wind put back in my sails I’ve since managed to sort out the horizon problem mentioned in the previous post, as well as spook some ghosts in the strange world that is my blender file. But, before I get to that, I’ve also been decorating the rim of our crater!
What do you mean? The crater needed decorating? What? Of course it did! With beautiful, wonderous, sensual destruction. Yep, I’ve been bulldozing buildings and filling them with garbage, all for the sake of ‘implied impact’. Why? Because that crater’s meant to be there from a bomb going off, not some ancient asteroid! The buildings closest to the hole needed a bit of wear and tear, to make sure no one thinks this is just a city built round a big hole. My first attempt at this was a bit flawed; I tried creating struts (a little like scaffolding) to stick out of felled buildings. Unfortunately, the polygon count ended up being disgustingly large, and the results weren’t even that fantastic. My second method was much more successful. In order to give this impression of destruction, I duplicated a load of the buildings, and cut them into little bits. Then I used a solidify modifier to give the exposed walls a thickness, before retexturing them and filling the remaining structures with some faux-rubble. Eager to see the results? Well, they’re coming, just be patient.
After this I wanted to reduce some of the repetition found in the city. I did this, firstly, by re-jigging the ratio of ‘square-topped’ to ‘strange-topped’ buildings. There are now far more rectangular shaped buildings than there are, say, ones with a cylindrical shape. Something about them appears less obviously repeated, and it definitely improves the scene. Secondly, I imported some other buildings that had been rendering pink. I thought I’d never be able to fix that, but I did, with a little detective work (for some reason a load of .psd’s were labelled .png in my texture folder, and that messed things up a bit). This increased the variety of building by a whole 5! And thirdly, I’ve started constructing 5 more rectangular buildings, just to push the illusion that little bit further.
With the city looking a little more vibrant, I thought I’d improve upon that flat old horizon line by generating a landscape (using an awesome landscape generator) and apply a modified version of our previous particle emitter.
Here are the results of all these things combined! All sepia-like.
Aaaand less-sepia, with current cloud cover.
Tomorrow I’ll get cracking on those 5 extra buildings, and hopefully have them all finished before monday. Here they are in their textureless state;
I’ll also try to improve on my cloud-creation method (as it appears the meshes I’ve produced so far have ended up all filled with holes) and get cracking on a bit more debris, along with roads and tarmac. I’ve also got to make some modifications to One of One himself at some point, as well as put a bit of crap down the crater, but once that’s done… I might actually get to start animating. Exciting stuff!
Thanks for reading, hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve seen here today. Let me know what you think, because I’m always down for some constructive criticism. As ever, if you could share/like this page, or even subscribe to our blog, we would love you for always!
Hope this finds you well,
Lots of Love,
Henry
(Y) Creatives 