As I was listening to the BBC radio as I was driving home on Monday, I heard a blurb for this envision our future cities contest. I had heard this before, but it never dawned on me to enter. That Monday I felt particularly motivated to enter. I got thinking, how many people have the skill set we have to create an image of the future? Not that many. I think about this not in the hopes to win, but in the hopes to better the contest. After all, a contest is only as good as the number of entries they receive. Anyways, it seemed fun. I would have loved to tell all of you about this, and had a big post going about out works-in-progress, but the deadline is today.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time at all to work on the concept of this image or the actual creation of the model. As I said, I started Monday after work and finished last night, (working on it in my spare time).
The Concept: (no text was allowed in this competition but I’m writing it here). I was envisioning the future city. But I was picturing a city perhaps in the Oceanic region or SE Asia. I wanted to answer the question of what do we do when the sea levels rise? As the seas rise small island civilizations will lose their land. I wanted to picture a whole community living on the sea. We have our city center off in the distance, and our slums? where most of the people live. I was also thinking about where people would get their food. (non-sea food). In this image I have these paths where this ‘collector’ thing travels. It harvests the crops that hydroponically grow around the supports of this track thing.
I would have liked to gotten a lot more crazy with the city and little future details, but I just didn’t have the time to develop much of anything.
SketchUp-Maxwell-Photoshop.
BBC.com/whatif
I really like your concept and the image; I especially think the texturing of the surfaces was really successful. What was your technique for that? It really helps to add another level beyond an already well developed model. It is also refreshing- in a way- to have a fantastical concept like this be presented in such a way so as to make one stop, and wonder if the image really might not be that far off from the truth of the coming future. The one criticism I would make is that I find the figure really distracting. I think it is mostly in that I focus on her red hair thing, trying to figure it out and what it is. Beyond that, I think this is an image that does a nice job of provoking thought and interest and is a good submission to add to a collection of visions for the future. Well done.
Thanks Steve, as I said, I wish I had heard about this earlier, I would have loved to see what you and logan could come up with.
The figure was very challenging for me. I knew I needed to have one to add scale, and to humanize the image. I agree, it is a little distracting though. Perhaps placing her more to the right would have drawn your eye to the city first. Yeah, trying to figure out what people will wear in the future was difficult too. Its actually a pillowcase on her head.. haha. I should have desaturated it a bit more.
As far as the textures go, this project was really fun. I never get to use grunge textures. They were all pulled off cgtextures.com (amazing website). To get a really nice bump map, I’m using the nvidia normal map filter <- google it. As far as the pillars touching the water, I created 2 maps one the regular map, and one with the water make gradient on them. Then just correctly aligned them in SU using the texture/position tool.
This looks like a fun project. Seems like this could be the not to distant future. I think the scale figure fits OK, maybe the red is a little strong. Did you have Caitlyn pose for these? It is fun to get to use all the different textures. I really like how the water turned out and how where the columns meet the water turned out. I hope you win the comp.