Breakout

[thomassturm]

A Blender project reflecting on how it felt to use an 8-bit home computer in 1982.

This is a tribute to the cover artwork of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum manual “Floating City” by John Harris. I spent many hours looking at the stunning floating city in the clouds while loading games on my Spectrum. The colors and the bold vision of the art was a promise of what a future with computers could mean for us kids.

I recreated the floating city in Blender - not attempting to be accurate, since that was a painting and this is a 3D model.

One interesting challenge is the scale of the models. The video is a single camera movement from a table with a home computer and a book at real-world sizes to a panorama of a floating city at a distance of about 40 kilometers. Some of the background cloud elements are 90 kilometers away. The “book” is really a hole in the table.

The ZX Spectrum model is a free download by Blurbur available here: https://blendswap.com/blend/9095

The video on Youtube:

https://youtu.be/RiJ3jClhomY

[NerdY1 (General nerd)]

Very creative, I love the warm tones!

[thomassturm]

Thank you! I tried to match the colors of the original artwork, but at the end had to actually tone it down a bit, since the original colors really only work on paper. Too intense for CG https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/66310/Officially-Licenced-John-Harris-Sinclair-Artwork-Poster-Prints/

[bartv (Bart Veldhuizen)]

I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!

Best of Blender Artists: 2026-40

[thomassturm]

Always an honor! Thank you!

[thomassturm]

Here’s a shot with the camera moved back from the “desk” - really just a wooden plank with a hole in the middle where the sides of the book create some shadow. The desk area is over-lit to drain most of the red atmosphere of the alien sky out of the desk closeups.