Monday 19 October 2015

Invisible Cities: Modelling Key Elements in Maya

I'm really having some issues with getting the angles and perspective right in my city, as I have a very specific plan for where everything is going as I have decided Baucis was made for a very specific purpose, so the city itself would have been designed in a very thought out way. All main structures have 6 sides, and the platform itself has 12. There are 2 cable carts per main terminus building side, and these reach out to each of the 12 "districts" of the city. So of course, I have to get the angles right or everything just looks ~off~ so I decided when I was sketching it all out to model the large main elements) the platform, legs, main terminus building, city dome) in Maya, to get the angles right, then I can take screenshots and work over the top of these in Photoshop when creating my views, ensuring my perspectives are right, saving me time and from a massive amount of stress. 

To start out I modelled the 6 sided main building, with a 6 (5 height, because this looked the best) sided bio-dome on top. I then spent quite a while trying to figure out how to create the curved struts/cable cart beams coming off of this providing transport. In the end I used a quarter of a torus and stretched it to the sizes i needed, then copied and rotated it to all the sides, giving me my 12 struts. The beams arent exactly even all the way along but at this point I was beyond trying to fix this, it doesnt need to be perfect as Im only using it as a rough base for drawing in photoshop. 


This is the view from the top, next I needed to rotate the struts on each face so they would fit the 12 sided city platform how I had planned. 


To help me achieve this I added in the base platform, at the approximate size I wanted for my city, and rotated each beam so there was one per 12th, rotating the longer beams 30 degrees and the smaller -15 degrees to line up in the centre of each "district".


This is the view from the side. Views of the model like this would be good bases for an outline for my establishing shot. 



Views like this are similar to what I plan for the exterior low angle shot.


Another viewpoint.


Next I created the city's dome - this is needed to protect the city from the outside hostile and polluted environment, providing a safe atmosphere for the inhabitants to live and plants to grow, the dome also creates water through condensation.


View of the city with dome (would be translucent however) from below, possible establishing shot viewpoint. 


Same shot without dome to show portion of main building that would show.


More viewpoints.


Establishing viewpoint in mesh mode to see through dome to building positioning. 


Exterior low angle shot viewpoint in mesh mode to show dome structure that would also be visible. 





No comments:

Post a Comment