{"id":108,"date":"2008-02-11T15:51:05","date_gmt":"2008-02-11T19:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/2008\/02\/11\/still-in-progress-retro-future-city-scene\/"},"modified":"2008-02-11T15:51:05","modified_gmt":"2008-02-11T19:51:05","slug":"still-in-progress-retro-future-city-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/2008\/02\/11\/still-in-progress-retro-future-city-scene\/","title":{"rendered":"Still in progress:  Retro-Future City Scene"},"content":{"rendered":"<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/grafx2\/blog\/retrofuturistic_city03.jpg\" alt=\"Retropolis - city scene in progress\" height=\"282\" width=\"501\" \/>\n<p style=\"margin-top:12px\">\nI continue my struggle to show you things that aren&#8217;t ready for your eyeballs yet with the current state of my (still to be named) retro futuristic city scene. I&#8217;ve made one pass through the middle distance, and a long pass through the distant city, and today I&#8217;m back in the middle distance again.\n<\/p><p>\nThis is the first practical use I&#8217;ve made of the <a href=\"http:\/\/bws.deviantart.com\/art\/Nova-York-in-Progress-III-38853818\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">city model<\/a> I started ages ago and worked on again during the fall. It&#8217;s interesting to see how I&#8217;ve come to use it. Because the city itself is built out of large, complex sections, it was simple enough to drop a complete copy into my <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/grafx2\/blog\/retrofuturistic_city03b.jpg\" alt=\"Close up of retro sci-fi city\" height=\"421\" width=\"163\" style=\"float:left;margin:12px;margin-left:0px;\"\/>background here. The surprising things happened when I tried to make a picture out of it; like Raymond Loewy&#8217;s revision of the <em>Lucky Strike<\/em> cigarette pack, the real trick was in figuring out what to throw away. So while I did plenty of moving, scaling, and rotating of individual buildings, more than anything else I had to decide which ones to delete completely in order to open up the vista in a way that served the picture.\n<\/p><p>\nI added a lot of detail to the monorail pylons and created catwalks that run their length. There&#8217;ll be a few workers up there soon. But today I&#8217;m positioning some shadow-casting silhouettes that create the illusion that more buildings, out of the frame, are casting shadows across the ones we see close up. There&#8217;s a lot of trial and error involved in that. Like there is, um, in everything else.\n<\/p><p>\nI&#8217;m still handling the scene in three separate layers. Once I combined the far and middle distance into a single scene the rendering times increased pretty dramatically &#8211; and having them all together didn&#8217;t actually solve any problem I needed to solve &#8211; so I split them apart again. Go figure.\n<\/p><p>\nOne little tool that was all sorts of help here is Martin Breidt&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scriptspot.com\/3ds-max\/infooverlay\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Image Overlay<\/em><\/a> script for 3DS Max.  It&#8217;s really meant to superimpose frame numbers and other data on renderings, but it&#8217;ll also do a quick image overlay.  I&#8217;m using it to drop in whole layers (like a Targa image of the foreground balcony) so that I can see how the layers stack up, while I&#8217;m just working on one.  A back layer&#8217;s easy &#8211; it&#8217;s just an environment map &#8211;\u00a0 but it&#8217;s been really helpful to composite that foreground in as I go, too.\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I continue my struggle to show you things that aren&#8217;t ready for your eyeballs yet with the current state of my (still to be named) retro futuristic city scene. I&#8217;ve made one pass through the middle distance, and a long pass through the distant city, and today I&#8217;m back in the middle distance again. This [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-graphics","category-works-in-progress"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}