the idea.
The idea is simple: a ship flying over the city. Should be easy enough to make, I thought and then proceeded to overthink the whole artwork for way too long. Until the day I snapped to my senses, realising that thinking can only take me this far.
The city’s main structure and the surroundings have already been decided before. It’s a part of the world I’ve been exploring in my mind recently. The Ice Planet, or Zymno as I like to call it, is too cold to be inhabitable. Extreme cold is capable of freezing anyone in just a few seconds. However, the inventors that people are, the Source came to the rescue, projecting heat within several kilometres of its radius, allowing people to live a normal life. As long as they don’t step outside of the city. To not go into detail, the main event of the city is the massive energy ball in the centre. Naturally, the rest should be adjusted to it.
How would people build around it? If there is limited space, what would their streets look like? Would they use cars? If they can build a fake sun that doesn’t burn them their technology should be a little bit more sophisticated.
By setting the rules of the world and knowing its unique conditions, making decisions on the look of the city was quite easy – sort of natural even. Perhaps overthinking wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
3d blocking & sketching.
As much as I love painting environments, vehicles are not my forte. Neither painting this much details of a cityscape. But these issues could be troubleshooted after sketching the idea, I decided, so I opened Blender.
- One massive glowing sphere. Check.
- A bunch of generated boxes around it. Check.
- A floating boxy ship. Check.
Pretty easy at this point. But a few questions arose:
What is the actual scale ratio between buildings and the Source?
How are the buildings placed? And therefore what do the streets look like?
What’s their size, etc?
I really liked the idea of being able to see the Source from any place in the city. Of course, that’s a bit unrealistic keeping in mind that I also wanted this city to have perhaps a few million citizens. However, knowing this I could easily come up with some solutions. If the Source is to be seen from the majority of the places then it means that the buildings should be more or less the same heights. Just like in Paris. The Eiffel Tower can be seen from all around the city because the City Council set a limit of buildings height to 37m, and later to 50m. That’s how I got an answer for two of my questions: the scale of the buildings and the Source. Another remained.
Now, the space is obviously limited. That means that every bit of it has to be utilized and that means not a lot of space for roads. But a lot of space on rooftops. Since the buildings are the same height, landing on the rooftops should be pretty straightforward. That opens up the airspace. Roads issue was solved.
So where do humans walk? I liked the idea of platforms and multiple levels. This would allow for a lot of the buildings to be also the streets. Platforms between them would allow people to move from one structure to another. I needed to create the feeling of it being cramped together. However, I didn’t want to make it overwhelming, like many of futuristic dystopian cities. Therefore stairs and lifts should be put in place and now we have a city that should feel like a fun labyrinth. The shops with displays could be on different levels. I guess naturally the levels above would be better off – not only better access to the ships but also sunlight.
camera setup.
Once the environment was blocked in it was time for the shot setup. I wanted to show the cityscape so facing the camera towards the Source seemed like an obvious idea. Pulling out too much to show the circular shape of the city was making the city look too small.
So I moved in a bit more and made the city’s radius larger. This way the city was now showing the scale. I really liked the idea with a bigger focal length, I think it was making the Source really stand out in scale against the city and the ship flying in.
But I wanted to show a bit of that circular shape of the city while still showcasing the scale. So I had to go with a smaller focal length that elongated the shot allowing me to also give the illusion of speed. I overlaid this shot with the dynamic composition template and it found out that everything was actually lining up pretty nicely, which convinced me that I’m making the right choice.
Out of curiosity, I placed the camera behind the Source. As much as it could be an interesting shot, it really didn’t bring in anything valuable. No context of the Source, no shape on the city – so I scrapped this idea.
3d scene set up.
Having decided on the camera placement, it was time to get the scene setup done. I decided to do as much in 3D as possible simply because of the amount of details this artwork required.
My first instinct was geo-nodes. I tried them before but Blender introduced a whole new system not so long ago and I still haven’t caught up on it. I used the geonodes to create the cubes, but my first issue was their rotation of them. They had to face the Source, not just straight forward. They also had to be placed on a specific plane shape. I decided there should be around 8 or more ‘main streets’ that would be bigger than the regular ones. This is just to add a little more structure to the overall plan of the city. I was also thinking of any celebrations or big events that might be happening.
The amount of geometry could crash the program so I knew I had to go low-poly. The OSM addon worked wonders for the first pass. I picked a small bit of Lyon, France, and imported the geometry into Blender. This was looking great – the shapes and building placements were interesting. I duplicated that around the Source and like that I had the city starting to take shape.
However I needed platforms. The area closer to the camera also needed some attention. For this scene I downloaded Simple SciFi geo nodes in hopes that I could utilise it for some detail work. I quickly realised that if I replaced the base geometry folder with my own simple buildings and the dots folder with some platforms I could generate my own city. This is what I did. With the modifiers options I could generate a lot of different building placements.
I brought the generated city into my scene and scattered them around the ground. This instantly made the whole image look more put together. With that in place I just needed my ship and I was good export.
For the ship I knew I wanted to use some pointy design. Anything with squerish design wouldn’t help to convey the speed. I also needed the lines to be pointing towards the Source, so I thought about this while sketching the shapes of different potential options. In the end I based my design on the SR-71 Blackbird. I started from there and build upon that, adding a little bit more bits here and there to break the obvious relation to the jet. However, this wasn’t really working out the way I wanted, and not long after I decided to download a free spaceship from TurboSquid. It came with all the parts being separate so I started moving things around. I pointed the wings down, added in four sets of thrusters, and some details on top.
I wanted to paint over it so I didn’t really bother with too much texture work. I just needed a general shape and the rest of the details I could add in photoshop.
With all of this ready, I rendered out several different passes along with masks and I could start with a paintover.
the paintover.
I actually painted this one twice. In the first version, I thought I’d add some fog in the city and avoid having any sharp lighting. This turned out to be difficult to pull off. I didn’t want to completely cover up the city. I wanted to show off the buildings. The detail was there but it was uninteresting, boring. Everything was one tone. Overall, looking up close, I thought it didn’t look too bad, however, zoomed out, it all blended up together, which made me believe that the painting is chaotic and hard to read. The lighting didn’t make sense and it was difficult to fight it in Photoshop.
So I went back to the Blender file and set up the sunlight. Right away I had more interest on the ground instead of the dark foggy blop of one-tone colour, like in the previous version. I also changed the position of the large building. I brought it closer to the camera instead of having it so far away in the back. In the first version, this building kept on lining up with the horizon line or the city line. I couldn’t find the right spot for it. Moving it closer allowed it to show the scale and also introduce another diagonal line leading toward the Source. It closed off the right side of the painting, which before was empty, and caused the gaze to wander away from the painting.
Once I brought the renders back to Photoshop I started the process again. This time I ended up with too much detail on the ground. Clouds shadows seemed to solve the issue pretty nicely. Thanks to that I was better able to control the light and dark areas of the city. Even though initially I wanted to have a rather gloomy sky, I decided against it. The first version of the painting already proved to me that I needed more light on the ground and I didn’t want the Source to be so overwhelmingly bright. Nor did I want to have an eerie feeling to the painting.
Before this painting, I painted the street view. It was the first attempt at tackling this city. The lighting in this piece is bright. It casts a yellow tone on the structures. Now, looking back, I think that the buildings could also be the bluish/silver colour that the buildings in the cityscape painting are. I went in this direction in the render, however, during painting I leaned more towards the yellow. It turns out it is tricky to make grey look inviting and positive.
In the first version, at some point, I applied a reversed fisheye filter. It helped the painting to feel more dynamic. I tried to simulate this effect in the second version in Blender. I increased the focal length and brought the camera closer to the ship. That change helped me get a little bit more of the city in, making it overall more dynamic and spacious.
Surprisingly the ship was probably the fastest and easiest for me to paint. The main structure was already there, the only thing for me to add was the texture and details. It went pretty quickly without much struggle.
I designed the Source before starting this painting. I had a general idea of its components, so it was just a matter of combining it all together. I also explored the textures in the street painting. I really liked the idea of the Source looking like a frozen bubble. The frost gives out a very nice texture. However, this texture was getting lost in the attempts of making the Source also shine. From far away the Source would lose this detail anyway, so I kept it overall bright. I had to indicate that it is a power source so adding lighting-like lines was a pretty automatic decision.
Somewhere in between all of this I also designed five buildings. More for myself. The first two, I came up with while painting the street view. Obviously. I needed these buildings to appear in the painting. However, I think it wasn’t until I sat down at the three other buildings later that I really started to understand the design language of this place. There is still a lot to uncover. I’m not so sure about the materials and textures in the city. I know that the dominant building material should be metal and I really would like it shiny and pretty. However, this is not as interesting. It leaves a lot less room for imperfections. Overall some surfaces should probably hold this shininess of the metal, while other parts should be worn out, replaced, and patched up together.
These sketches I kept very simple. I wanted to focus on the structure and leave the materials behind. The first two buildings I designed were in 3D. This made me focus on too many things at once. I wanted to apply textures as quickly as possible to test it with lighting. For the later buildings, I kept it mostly in Photoshop. For inspiration, I took mostly classical Roman architecture and European neoclassicism. Trying to blend elements of these with a sci-fi feel was exciting to explore. I didn’t want to make it too obvious, however, I did want to make it feel familiar.
final thoughts.
This project taught me a lot and was extremely fun. I already came up with a bunch of other ideas on how to make this city look even cooler. But this has to be it for now. Otherwise, you might catch me in 2 years still repainting a 58th version of this cityscape painting. However, to sum up on what I think could be improved: I think that the labyrinth part could be explored even more. This more applies to the painting of the street view. The open space looks fine but I think it lacks a little of that human touch. Well, maybe robots built it, who knows. I also think that the nose of that ship in the cityscape painting could be improved. But the more I messed with it the stranger it looked. Another thing would be that building on the right. It needs to be designed separately and I sort of think of it there more like a placeholder than an actual building. (Rumor has it that this building is actually a default cube.)
Right, anyway. Onto another.
Tori x