Hello everyone, this is the first finished piece I post on the forums. I’m passionate about computational design and urbanism and I wanted to see how things would work out if I used a generative approach to modelling combined with procedural shaders. The model itself it made using a Diffuse-limited Aggregation script in Grasshopper, imported as an .fbx file, with everything else handled by Blender. The big problem I had with this approach is that the UVs on the meshes are all world aligned, which meant I sort of had to find workarounds in shader nodes. I’m still fairly new to rendering so I probably overlooked some things. In any case, I would like to hear what you think and what I can improve in the future. The overall look I’m going for is a cyberpunk / bladerunner dystopia.
hey, I like your sand storm / cloud!
What are those orange lights between the skyscrapers?
Your skyscrapers are mostly placed randomly, I can’t see any streets. In reality you got some sort of street grid where your buildings are placed. cheers
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
Thank you!
Hey Konstantin! I wasn’t able to post more pictures because this was only my second post but hopefully the below images will clarify things:
This above is the view in Rhino 3D. The buildings are generated base on a grid network which itself is based on a “main” street network done using a DLA script. You can see the different grid patterns making up different “neighborhoods” as it were. The skyscrapers appear random, but are placed on lots close to the main street network with a big cluster in the center of the city. The goal isn’t to have an orderly “planned” city, but a dystopian version of something you would actually see today.
This is a white model in Blender of the render posted. Because the scene is so large (98 000 individual meshes), certain details are left out because they’re simply irrelevant at this scale. So the street network is a patchy emmisive surface covered by fog.
How’d you get the city? Without crashing ur pc that is?
nice, thanks for sharing. I feel like you could improve your picture just by changing the perspective a bit, maybe hold this in your mind for future projects.
Will do! I’m also looking at detailing a skyscraper so that I can have a proper model up close with the rest of the city as background, I think that would work best. I’ve tried perspective shots with this but it sorta feels off because of the balance between detail and scale.
this is the script for it. For everything barring the skyscrapers, I’m just using a bounding box to simple mesh box function, which is probably the least demanding geometry barring vectors / points. I’m actually thinking of using a technique from rendering where I don’t need to actually output the buildings in this script. I can just create a box out of square or four-sided plots and use box mapping in a separate script to bring in detailed geometry. This way I can also record a video of the city “growing”, which would make things much more clear.