Seit ca. 1996 plane ich eine 3D Version von NewSydney zu erstellen. Ich habe ordnerweise Konzeptzeichnungen erstellt und einige bereits als 3D Modelle erstellt. Der Löwenanteil dieser Arbeit erfolgte noch in Cinema 4D R6+ und läßt sich nur mit viel Arbeit in mein aktuelles „Tool of the trade“ Blender übertragen. In Cinema 4D habe ich hauptsächlich prozedurle Texturen über das sogenannte Box-Projektionsverfahren verwendet bei dem diese Texturen auf die Flächen einer Boundinbox des jeweiligen Objektes projiziert wird ohne das UV Koordinaten definiert werden.

Dieses Verfahren kann Blender nicht 1zu1 abbilden (prozedurlae Daten lassen sich nicht über die verfügbaren Austauschformate transferieren. Weiterhin kann C4D6+ keine OBJ mit MTL erzeugen. Die MTL Datei enthält normalerweise die Materialeigenschaften einer OBJ Datei. Das OBJ-Format jedoch war zu der Zeit nicht besonders gut implementiert, so das es viele Abweichungen zwischen den einzelenen Apps gab. Nun denn. Um Texturen zu übertragen gab es weitere Formate aber jedes hat seine Eigenarten. So wie ich die Modelle damals erstellt habe lassen sie sich nicht automatisiert und ohne Nacharbeit nach Blender übertragen. Da die Qualität dieser Modelle nicht so toll ist, ist dies vielleicht nicht unbedingt ein Nachteil.

Why do I continue in English? No idea.

The image above shows a few of the unique buildings I created for the project. From left to right (skyscrapers only): Salamanca Industries, Shinhama Pharma, Torika Industries, Cathedral Arcology, Metropolitan Administration Bldg., Cellborg Systems, yCorp Enterprises, Sagawa Inc., Plaza Hotel, Metropolice Tower and Rhaan Interstellar Corp (All names represent fictional individuals, cities, corporations and organisations. Any resemblence to realworld entities is purely coincidental and does not imply any affiliations or endorsements).

The oldest city-map (a map of the city center) was handdrawn many years ago using pencils, ink fineliner and felt tip markers. The northern (upper) part of the image is older than the lower.

Based on that image and realizing that this map represets a tiny area of the projected city, more maps were created. The following show a newer city area, about 4 times as large and located at another part of the city. Some names were reused.

Only in recent years the old and new maps were merged to form a unified metropolitan area map putting the previous efforts into relation. The following map has been created in Inkscape and shows a superimposed copy of the handdrawn map. The central district depicted in the image above can be easily recognised.

Of course no 3D representation wil ever depict this metroplex as a whole, so the project focuses on certain areas of which some have yet to be chosen. All images are to create a virtual city with dense background information, which is suitable for RPGs (online or pen and paper). A community function will later allow members to open personal pages showing their dwellings within the city, whic will be represented by clickable portions of the map. But mind you: this will never be an open world mmorpg!

Following up are some concept sketches I made a few years ago.

So the next steps will be the porting and upgrading of my old models to Blender and to a look and feel roughly eqivalent to other sets of assets I plan to utilise for this purpose: Greeble City Blocks, Greeble City Blocks 2, Greeble City Blocks 3, Chinatown by Stonemason, or the Dystopia City Blocks Packages all from DAZ3D.

Now lets talk about how this will be done. I am a very early supporter of Arnaud Couturier`s SceneCity AddOn for Blender. The current version that I have access to is 0.9.x and supports the creation of your own building libraries. This will be a good way to produce much more varied citycypes as compared to the original which puts out images like the following one at the press of a mouse button. Please note that this is a preview render in Blender Cycles at 80 samples per tile. The number of samples defines the graininess or noise of the rendered image and more typical values range from 200 to 500. So this is rendered at a very low sample rate.

Using the afforementioned assets from Stonemason the following scenery shows some of the possible buildings surrounding a concrete landing area.

The next page will detail the progress of the project…