Invisible Cities: Baucis - Building and Domes Development

I created more building thumbnails/forms, experimenting with the dome shape, using forms I created in Maya to help me, also creating multiple layers for one structure  so I could sandwich the plant forms into the dome and have it look like it was an actual bio dome. First I made it with an opaque white back layer, and later had to come back and re-do this to be transparent to appear as glass. I also put slight sheen/shadowing on the front panes to help with this effect. I also created the tall, hexagonal accommodation buildings the inhabitants of Baucis would live in. The windows are close and compact to conserve glass for the bio-domes, as it is not essential for the inhabitants to have large windows. For the dome on top I just duplicated the finished bio dome form and warped the item to make the base concave to fit the perspective. I also created a hexagonal and vine inspired cable cart to layer into my paintings. 

In a separate document I collaged natural forms copied from my interior shot into the completed dome form, creating different arrangements sandwiched in between the dome layers to create an assortment of bio-domes to be used in my establishing and low angle exterior shots. 

I then copied these dome arrangements into another document and merged the layers, creating a "flat" one layer image so the plants inside would not accidentally get moved when repositioning and resizing the domes. The initial domes I made I made with the opaque white background (left) and when I came to putting some of these into my low angle shot I realised how bad and fake this looked, so had to come back, re make the back layer as mentioned above, transfer this into the above document, then re make dome compositions and go through the same process again. This mistake cost me quite a lot of time and was a big frustration, but I'm glad I took the time to go back and fix the issue as I know if I hadn't my final outcomes would be nowhere near as convincing as they are now. I have put different background colours to show the difference between the opaque and translucent domes. 

I then created another document, duplicated my accommodation building into this a few times, then duplicated some of the domes from the above document on top of these, warping the bottom edge to fit perspective. Again I've used different background colours to show the dome transparency. 

Once I had flattened all the layers in the above documents, so each dome or building was made of just one layer, it was a simple matter of just duplicating these forms into my establishing and low exterior paintings and re sizing, arranging, flipping, rotating and changing the layers of the forms to create the sense of a "full" city, and give it depth and perspective.