Ideas
The initial idea I had for the project was to create a mythological setting with a temple and statues of greek gods, but when we were told that everything had to be modelled ourselves, my confidence in that idea fell. I had done some research and found reference before we were told this but those were of no use. i had also found an image of an underwater city but I didnt do that either. That was unfortunate because if I couldve pulled it off it wouldve looked cool.
The final idea ended up being behind the idea of a futuristic floating city. The idea popped in my head as my previous work revolved around creating a filter of a futuristic looking robot and the whole future theme, so I ended up creating a floating city. Going into this assignment, I somehow knew that what i’ll finally make would be nowhere near to what I was imagining and even though the final product did not turn out as I had pictured it in my head, I am proud of it and take it as a learning to work on my skills and techniques to familiarise myself with the softwaren so by next term I become more advanced at it.
Basic Modeling
To start my world, I created the base of my floating city and then started adding differently shaped buildings into it. The inspiration of these buildings came from the top of my head, except the avengers tower that was very obviously from the Avengers movie. Being a huge Marvel fan, when you think about futuristic looking skyscrapers,
Texturing
once the modeling was done I moved on to texturing. There are various websites that can be used to find textures and one of the most used one that was also used in class is Textures.com. For some reason when I opened up the website, it refused to load, all I could see was a blank dark blue screen. I restarted my wifi in hopes that it was a connection issue but when that didnt fix it I ended up restarting my laptop. Sadly, even after fully reviving my laptop, the website was stubborn enough to not open so I started looking for alternatives. That was when I came across sketchuptextureclub.com. It was a life saver, It had all the materials and textures I wanted. I also tried out poliigon textures but those were of no use.
After finding the required textures, I applied them to my buildings and the base.
I also created a fountain after watching a 2 part youtube tutorial that did not fit in the overall scene of the world but I was proud of it so I kept it. I then added textures to that as well and used the ocean shader to make the water more realistic.
After finishing all the texturing of the buildings and the base, this was what it finally looked like.
Animation
For the animation part, I added a camera going through the entire world by tracing out a path for it to travel on
Lighting and Rendering
as you can see from the above image, I added a sky dome depicting starry space so it looked like a floating world. The hunt for HDRIs was not a fun one. I had to trial and error around 10 HDRIs before I was finally satisfied with one.
For some weird reason, when I rendered my world it was showing just a black screen
And then I realised that I forgot to add external lighting
After rendering the entire scene and filling my storage with pngs, I headed over to Premiere Pro to create the final video