Further research

During my Interim Crit it was suggested that I look into having an underlying style for my city, a reason for it being created such as who is it for. So I read the passage from Divine Comedy that I am doing again and picked out a few key elements that could be researched further to come up with a style. Phil suggested that I use serpents and through research this does seem to be quite a common theme and something that represents the religious aspects of Divine Comedy as well as the furies, and Medusa. But there was something else that come up and that was bat wings. Both I think have potential and I'll make up a few influence maps to help me incorporate elements of them into my design.

Additional Research by Kym Mumford

Maya Tutorials

Maps Part 6: Diffuse Maps - Stone Pillars

Adaptation: Interim Crit

Interim crit.pdf by Kym Mumford

Rough Concept Models

So I've done rough models of all the floor plans that I did and I'm pretty happy with the results, I have a much better idea of what I need to do, such as some of the more closed floor plans don't really work as they just look like solid objects and the detail will be lost on them. So I know I need to make my city more open so that it can be imposing but the detail is not lost. There are certain aspects of a few of the floor plans that I really like. Number 1, 5, 8 and 11 I can see having some potential. So my next step will be to continue moving bits around and combining parts and seeing what I can come up with.

More floor plans

I did some more floor plans so that I would have quite a few to play around with in Maya, and hopefully it will start to give me a basic structure that I can work with and add details to.

Thumbnails

After doing my collages I went onto trying to create them into something that looks like a city. I did some thumbnails and I really didn't like them, some of them look more like plants than anything else, so I felt a little bit lost with what I was doing and when I had my tutorial with Phil earlier in the week he suggested I take a different approach with things since the way I was doing stuff wasn't working. So I did some floor plans of my city to try help me figure out what type of structure I'll be working with.

So here are my floor plans. I'm not quite sure about them if any of them would work Until I start visualizing them in 3D its hard to say. So I think I'll make some more and then take them into Maya and see what I can come up with. 

After I did the floor plans I went back to one of my collages and thought I would give it another go at trying to create something out of it. This time going for designing the gate. I actually did a thumbnail I really liked, it took me quite a while to get it but it was the first thing I was happy with so I went on to develop it a little further and design the rest of it. 

I thought I would draw the gate straight on so I could figure out the way I wanted the rest of it to look. I like the idea of having people stuck within the gate and I like the arches that go around it but still not sure what the design on the gate will be. I kind of like Gate 2 but I'm not 100% sure about it. 

So now I need to go back to designing the city I think with the floor plans I made and using aspects of the gate I can come up with some thumbnails I like. I'm also thinking of taking my collages into Maya along with the floor plans and making them in 3D so I can look at them in a new way. 

More collages

Here are the rest of my collages, I ended up using very few of my photos that I had left since they were not abstract images it was quite difficult to manipulate them into something usable that didn't still look like the original photo. I started to repeat the same process that I had used on some of the other images and came up with the same results, but I think I have quite a few collages to work with some of them are definitely more usable than the others, so now what I'll be doing is start to bring all these collages into something recognisable as a city.