Making of the city still and animation by bertrand benoit

I've long been a fan of Rudolf Herzog and Stefan Morrel and this Blender-Indigo piece was my attempt to recreate something in the same vein with my everyday tools.

Modeling (Click to enlarge thumbs)

This scene starts with a roughly outlined plane and a few large boxes that serve to sketch the broad anatomy of the landscape. For these large vistas, it is important to model only what you need (for the still or for the animated). The big pyramids to the left and right, not just frame the shot nicely, they also occupy space that will not have to be filled with geometry. I then create basic greebles to fill the void. These provide a sense of density in the scene, but they're extremely simple and are not meant for the foreground or the area close to the camera path during the animation. Creating these greebles as distinct cube objects is a lot more poly-efficient than extruding our base plane or using greeble-creating plug-ins. Last but not least, there are only six or seven different meshes here. All greebles are instanced proxies of these original objects using the same meshes (to do this, select the object you want to instance and press "Alt+D"). This will save a lot of memory when exporting to, and rendering in, Indigo.

Modeling2 & Texturing (Click to enlarge thumbs)

The close-up greebles are far more detailed, but as for the rest, much of this detail comes from the texturing. Here I've used only one texture (with three maps: diffuse, bump and specular) to create the dull but reflective metal that makes up the city. The lights on the buildings have been created with one texture map (mapped as a textured emitter in Indigo) by cutting and pasting hundreds of photos of night-time cityscapes.

The result is one giant sci-fi window map that can be used for texturing buildings or spaceships. I keep using this map over and over again.

Lighting
The Blender light set-up (for the animation) includes a spotlight (1) for illumination and volumetrics, a sun (2) for reflections and illumination, a sky backplate (with emit value set at 0.2), several non-textured lights throughout the scene such as searchlights (3, actually four spotlights) or spaceship engines. In Indigo, only the sun and the textured emitters are active as light sources. (Sky from CGTextures.com).

Next Page : Watch the animation and final steps