Fantasy Architecture Archives - Digital Urban

Steampunk City – Maya

Andy — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 13:57:00 +0000

Details are slightly sparse on this one apart from it was modelled and rendered in Maya and features a city designed around the ‘Steampunk’ theme.

According to the wiki – Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction which came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

There is something about Steampunk cities that fits 3D animation so well:

The movie above was uploaded to YouTube by rkrehe20

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Greeble a 3D City: Tutorial 1: Greeble Skyscraper

Andy — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:09:00 +0000

Greebles became a core part of our ‘Fantasy Architecture City‘ a few years back – allowing details to be added to buildings quickly and easily. In a new series of posts we thought we would provide a walk through of how to quickly and easily create your own city using the Greeble Plugin for 3D Max.
For those new to Greebles – Wikipedia defines them as:
A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects. They serve no real purpose other than to add complexity to the object, and cause the flow of the eye over the surface of the object to be interrupted, usually giving the impression of increased size. It is essentially the small detailed technical part of a larger object. The detail can be made from geometric primitives, including cylinders, cubes, and rectangles, combined to create intricate, but meaningless, surface detail. Greebles are commonly found on models or drawings of fictional spacecraft in science fiction.
In part one we are going to build the skyscraper featured top right:
You will need:
1x Copy of 3D Studio Max (a 30 Day trial can be downloaded from here)
1x Greeble Plugin installed into your Plugins Folder
Time Required: 5 -10 Minutes
Level: Beginner
Step 1: Making a Cylinder
Create a new cylinder in 3D Max with the following units: Radius: 50, Height: 600, Height Segments: 32, as pictured below:

For those new to 3D Max the Cylinder object can be found under ‘Standard Primitives’ on the right hand side tab with the ‘Arrow’ Icon.
Step 2: Selecting the Polygons
We are going to give the cylinder some shape by using the ‘Taper’ Modifier, before we taper we need to convert the Cylinder to an ‘Editable Poly’ – simply right click on your cylinder and select ‘Convert To/Convert to Editable Poly’:

Step 3: Adding some Shape
Now our cylinder is converted we need to select all the polygons in order to change the shape to something a little more interesting. Go into the objects ‘Modify’ list – you will find ‘Modify’ next to the Create Tab. Expand the drop down list and select ‘Polygon’, now click and drag around the object and you will see your selected polygons turn red.
We now apply the ‘Taper’ Modifier which is under your ‘Modify’ list. We have used 0.4 for the amount and ticked the ‘Symmetry’ box to ensure the top and bottom of our skyscraper is tapered by the same amount.
Once your object is tapered right click on your cylinder and select ‘Convert To/Convert to Editable Poly’ exactly the same as last time.
Our object is now ready to be ‘Greebled’
Step 4 Greeble
Select all your polygons again and on your ”Modify’ tab scroll down and select ‘Greeble’. Your skyscraper will be transformed from a dull cylinder to a slightly more futuristic building:
There are a number of setting that can be tweaked using Greeble, the standard setting should be fine but feel free to change the extensions, densities and type until you are happy with the result.
Step 5 Adding Detail
We can now add some quick detail to the roof by adding on 3 standard boxes:
Once placed select all three boxes and click Greeble again:

Greeble can be extremely useful, in little under 5 minutes a simply cylinder can be transformed:
The next step of the tutorial will cover using Greeble to build a complete city in which to insert your own fantasy skyscrapers…
See: Greeble a 3D City: Tutorial 2: The Cityscape

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Cities in the Crysis Sandbox Editor

Andy — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:32:00 +0000

Our city – built as part of the Fantasy Architecture project – is normally our first test point for importing into new engines. It provides a good test of the ability to cope with large cityscapes and real-time lighting etc.

With our work using the Crysis Sandbox Editor ongoing in preparation for a tutorial we have finally managed to embed the city into the game, as the movie below illustrates.

Working out a smooth work flow has been slightly more problematic than planned with crashes and reboots an added ‘feature’ to the development. With a bit of patience however it does work. The movie above is work in progress but the engine is coping well with extending the city to almost the horizon.

Below is the city imported into the Oblivion Engine for way of comparison:

See our Oblivion Tutorial for the above, we should be able to get the first Crysis tutorial online next week….

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SketchUp City

Andy — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:37:00 +0000

SketchUp is almost custom made for creating fantasy cityscapes and continuing our series of SketchUp Cities we feature a movie uploaded by shady110:

We like its style, also nice to see the Bank of China crop up in the model – possibly one of our favourite buildings – see our Flickr Pool for a panorama of the Bank of China we captured last week.

You can download Sketchup from http://www.sketchup.com

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SketchUp City

Andy — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:37:00 +0000

SketchUp is almost custom made for creating fantasy cityscapes and continuing our series of SketchUp Cities we feature a movie uploaded by shady110:

You can download Sketchup from http://www.sketchup.com

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SketchUp – City of the Future

Andy — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:12:00 +0000

The third in a series of posts looking at user created cities in the freely available Google SketchUp software.

Created by a user known as J-Wall the model is entitled ‘City of the Future’

The movie below is captured in real-time via SketchUp with ‘hidden line’ rendering:

Music – IML Perfect Day.

The model is describved by J-Wall as:

‘A large square island is divided into quarters by two large boulevards. On the west side of town is the Capitol, a 1052 foot tall granite building flanked by gardens. The central tower is topped by a huge 4-sided clock and a spire with a gold-covered star over all. As mandated by Imperial law, the Capitol is the tallest building for 5 miles around. At the north end of town lies Military Plaza, a large field, which, with all seats used, can seat 100,000 people. Immediately west lies the sports complex, which is comprised of one “arena” and one stadium. At the southern end of this boulevard is the Monument to Our Fallen Soldiers, a large bronze statue of a soldier wielding a rifle.

The southeast corner of town is home of the main parking garage; other conveyance is provided by the ultra-clean “mag-lev” subway system. At the opposite corner lies an old coal-fired power plant; it is hardly used due to abundant alternative fuel sources. The south boulevard is home to an opera house and concert hall. Several large apartments and rowhouses are scattered over the town; the southwest side of town is home of several single houses from a failed urban renewal plan. The First House is technically in the central tower of the Capitol; however, the ruler actually lives in the large yellow-and-stone house. Several corporate offices, including one of a large plumbing-supply chain (it looks like a giant toilet, or maybe the Guggenheim in New York) are scattered throughout the town.

You can download ‘City of the Future’ direct into SketchUp from the 3D Warehouse.

Start creating your own city by downloading the free version of Google SketchUp.

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SketchUp Cities

Andy — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:58:00 +0000

The second in a series of posts looking at user created cities in the freely available Google SketchUp software.

Created by a user known as RLgun the model is entitled ‘Paradise City’ – ‘A huge city created out of imagination, it has gas stations, fast food joints, an airport, skyscrapers, a mansion, and much much more. It took me at least a week to complete. You have to download it and view it at street level to see how gigantic it is.’

The movie below is captured in real-time via SketchUp with ‘hidden line’ rendering to detail the city model:

Music – IML Perfect Day.

You can download Paradise City direct from the 3D Warehouse.

Start creating your own city by Downloading the free version of Google SketchUp.

The post SketchUp Cities appeared first on Digital Urban.

SketchUp Cities

Andy — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:58:00 +0000

The second in a series of posts looking at user created cities in the freely available Google SketchUp software.

The movie below is captured in real-time via SketchUp with ‘hidden line’ rendering to detail the city model:

Music – IML Perfect Day.

You can download Paradise City direct from the 3D Warehouse.

Start creating your own city by Downloading the free version of Google SketchUp.

The post SketchUp Cities appeared first on Digital Urban.

SketchUp Futuristic/Fantasy/Modern Cities

Andy — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 12:02:00 +0000

SketchUp allows users from all walks of life the ability to build whatever they may wish and subsequently share the model with the world via the 3D Warehouse – a Google service that lets you search, share, and store 3D models.

As such it opens up the way to the creation of modern cities and fantasy architecture rather than the more traditional route of modelling real-world buildings for inclusion in Google Earth.

In a new series of posts we will be featuring models submitted to the 3D Warehouse – first up is ‘Modern City’ by a user known as jblsscad.

Music – IML Perfect Day.

The movie above features the model directly captured in real-time via SketchUp in firstly textured mode and then moving onto monochrome, highlighting the underlying geometry, before finally switching on the shadows.

A nice feature to add into the 3D Warehouse would be the ability to leave comments or messages for users – in a YouTube type manner – at the moment its difficult to track down any contact information for the users who created the models.

You can download the Modern City direct from the 3D Warehouse.

Start creating your own city by Downloading the free version of Google SketchUp.

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Fantasy Architecture – SketchUp

Andy — Sat, 12 May 2007 09:21:00 +0000

A while ago we built a imaginary or fantasy city in 3D Studio Max – partly as a way of experimenting with the software and partly as a way to get around the rules implied of our Virtual London model of not being able to insert any politically sensitive buildings.

As part of the export process we used the Oblivion Engine to visualise the city in real-time, a technique which works remarkably well and one that we will have a tutorial on shortly. The movie below provides a sample flythough of the city in Oblivion.

Since our first development Google released SketchUp, their free of charge 3D modelling software. SketchUp is a powerful 3D modeller and one which is both fun and intuitive to use – not something you could say about 3D Max. As such it has led to the development of a number of fantasy cities such as ‘Sun City’ which we feature below.

Developed and posted by a YouTube user known as foxmtbr it provides an insight into the sort of city creations possible with SketchUp.

Google SketchUp is free of charge, if you fancy making your own fantasy city then simply download the software, start building and let us know how it goes..

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