Introduction

I recently graduated from Portsmouth University in the UK, which was really fantastic in getting my skills from 0 to where they are now. Currently, I’m freelancing and working on personal projects on the side to bulk up my showreel. With most of my work, I focus on lighting and trying to capture a certain mood or feel for an environment.

About the scene

This scene started a couple of months ago as I was taking my daily dose of concept art and stumbled upon a fantastic image which inspired me.Unfortunately I can’t remember where this bit of concept art came from. I did the basic blockout in a frenzy, in one day, plopping down all the basic shapes, looking back and forward from the concept to my 3ds max, drinking a lot of coffee just to try and push as much as possible in one sitting. Finally, after hours of modelling I was finished, at something like 4 am in the morning. So with severe eye strain from sitting 2cm from my screen and with chemically fueled wakefulness, with one eye open and one sleep I looked at my scene. It was a frankensteinian-esque disaster. I closed 3ds max and went to sleep.

If I had this image with me today, I’d show you it and tell you how not everything translates well into 3d, alas, I do not have the image, but I’m going to tell you anyway, “not everything translates well into 3d”.

Anyhow, I didn’t make that scene but I did begin the groundworks for something else. I set about re-modeling everything and playing with forms and composition, I still wanted to have many elements of the initial image but, a dense urban setting, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to lay it all out. I had to do a bit of concepting myself, and there are two things I kept in mind when doing it. Blocking, or layout, or whatever you might call it, is perhaps (in my opinion) the most important aspect of 3DCG, maybe even any artwork. Why? Because you’re playing with the biggest spaces on your (virtual) canvas, you’re filling up 90% of the scene with space right from the get-go (be it positive or negative space) and if it looks bad from here, then nothing else will fix it. Pretty textures or a nice shader will not fix bad composition and will only act as window dressing. So that is rule number one that I needed to get right, rule number two is getting correct values. Of values, I learned from various youtube art tutorials, namely Sinix and Sycra Yasin (both are amazing art instructors), when I was really into digital painting a couple of years prior. Value is for lighting, as the composition is for modeling. So what is the value?

Value is the darkness or lightness of a pixel, so when I say values i’m referring to the balance between light and dark in an image. Now for instance, if you take an image from any prominent photographer and turn it greyscale (if it isn’t already), you will see very clearly, without the distraction of colour, how having the right balance of dark and light is key for a captivating image. What you might see in a good photo are areas of low and high values separated like continents, if you squint, or take a step back, you can still tell what the image is; it doesnt lose itself in a sea of noise. Maybe to illustrate it a bit better, I can say that having very contrasting values close to each other will appear too distracting and will make the image look noisy. So composition and value are two things I think about before anything else, all the time. They are not the only rules, there are many more, but just the ones I keep in my mind right at the start.

When I finished blocking out the apartments, I wanted to think more in detail about where exactly this place might be, and I was inspired by Kowloon Walled city. A city home to an entire underclass of people in Hong Kong, crooks, opioid addicts and the like. Before it was demolished in 1994, it housed 50,000 inhabitants in 0.02 square kilometers. I wanted to recreate the dense, dirty urban dwellings, something that might be seen as you’re passing by on a train and wondering, “I wonder whats there?”. Because of the dense dwellings, it occurred to me that you could probably see the lives of many of these people just through one snapshot,looking through their windows, and whilst no one might be present, you could see how the people lived through their personal objects. As a final thought, I wondered what it would be like to live on the border of such a city, one house being in an opulent apartment whilst the other being on the opposite. This is what I had in mind when building this image, I’m not necessarily fully satisfied with how this message is conveyed but I think it’s mostly there.

Modeling