Building my own City

will2power

I've started a little side project in deciding to build my own city. Well not a whole city, but enough of one to be able to make it look believable. It came about when I was doing my own interior render scenes. After doing all that work indoors, I always had to end up finding a stock photo to put in the background. That's fine for a quick render test, but it never seems to look right to me when I try to put it in a serious render. So what's a a guy to do?

Anyway, this particular image gave me an idea. I was trying to do a conversation between two people in a moving car. The set is actually Sandy Bay, but I had to rescale the car and figures to make the sizes approximate. That was kind of a pain because you're dropping figures in and out, and going through all the trouble of sizing them side by side so that they look like they're scaled properly, only to have to recalculate all that in order to make them fit in Sandy Bay. No offense to the 3DU guys --Sandy Bay was the first set I ever purchased and I still love using it.

will2power

The look to me, looks way better than trying to resize a stock image. You get a better sense of depth and scale than you do with a flat image. Plus, I like the fact that all I have to do is place the figures and go --the lighting is fine for doing a simple outdoor scene.

So back to my line of thinking --It occurred to me that it would be easier to put together a city street or two and size them properly so that all I have to do is place the models and go. I could have gone with Urban Sprawl, but to me I wanted a different look and feel. I wanted to do the story in a sleepy little hamlet by the sea that's a bit more... eclectic.

That was not so easy to do with just buying a pack. So I decided to see about building one myself. Now the idea was not to model each and every building, but to see if I could take what resources I already have, and make one of my own. I started with the Streets by MaClean and the SkyDome from Sandy Bay Seaside Village

I didn't go with the base of Sandy Bay because to be honest, it doesn't look good for my purposes. If I was using Toon Generations, then it probably would look fine. The buildings look okay, but not the layout of the city. The bridges don't look realistic, and the waterfall so close to the ocean running through the town just doesn't look practical. But the sky and the lights that come with it are great, so I chose to use them. I spend a bit of time laying out a few streets so that I had a good size base to start with.

will2power

I found that you can actually use the Sandy Bay Buildings if you resize them. I'm using a few of them here with some of the buildings fromthe Le Village Bundle. It's not looking bad. I added a couple of vehicles to give a better sense of scale in terms of everything.

will2power

Basically I'm going through the buildings that I have, and placing and rescaling them so that they look consistent with one another in the scene. I'm trying to use the elements that I already have in order to do this and not modeling a bunch of other things. I'll keep up with showing my progress in other posts. The only thing I'm going to have to go back and do is create a few driveway props so that people can go in and out of parking lots and stuff. I"m trying to find a good gas station too.

bigh

good idea - be better when you can start to do angles

will2power

I'm not really so worried about angles. No one's going to really see street angles unless you show it to them. I just want to develop a consistent environment for the purpose of telling a story. Maybe at some point that might change, but for now, A grid layout of streets is fine for what I want to do.