In what can only be described as “not very good” timing, week 2 of the Cyberpunk Art Challenge coincided with a huge week of work at my dayjob, honestly making coming home to open up Maya and UE4 a bit of a struggle. I powered through though, and am pretty pleased with where my blockout has ended up. The beauty of the approaching deadline is that I genuinely can’t afford to deliberate on it anymore, else I’ll just be making it harder on myself later on.
A bit more on the story...
In my last post I suggested that I’m way more interested in exploring how the more mundane spaces evolve in a cyberpunk world. While hyper-rich corporations will have their steel and glass skyscrapers just short of the clouds, where they can look down on the lower classes like rats in the city street mazes, what does a supermarket look like? What does the apartment of someone who is making just enough money to survive look like?
Using The Subway by Helio Frazao as a jumping off point, I began to build a story of a vandalised public health clinic located in the subway tunnels. I’ve always loved how train stations or subway stations always seem to form their own micro-society of convenience stores, pawn shops, restaurants, etc. so I jumped on the opportunity to create a scene expanding on that.
As we’re seeing today in our current world, although technology is advancing rapidly, the majority of it improving our lives, there is a subset of society that is opposed to some of this advancement. As this technology marches on, I think this divide is likely to only get wider in the coming years, pushing both sides to the extreme edges. While human augmentation is easily palatable to the corporations benefiting or the elite enough to afford it, the concept would be alien and unknown to those much lower socio-economic ladder, so resistance, anger and push-back when the technology eventually trickles down would be likely - we all know at least one person who thinks electric cars are going to ruin us right?
Dealing with artist block(out)
The blockout in Unreal was relatively straightforward, thanks to a pretty narrow scope. As I progressed, I ended up moving further from the concept than I expected, which is actually fine as the challenge rules stipulate it should only be used for inspiration.
I made sure to focus heavily on composition, choosing my hero camera shot early and as a basis to build around. Opening up the ceiling to a skylight helped add some verticality and visual interest, and will give a window to the foggy buildings outside, hopefully giving a better sense of the locality of the subway. After rounding off the skylight to a more interesting shape, I reused the shape for the shop signage and extrusions from the ceiling. I think this curved architecture works pretty well in this instance and reminds me off modern shopping mall architecture I’ve seen in the last few years, which utilise similar shapes and throw them around as decor to appear as art, but are done so without any real intent, they’re just kinda….there… I think these designs will age as the designs of malls from the 80s have aged to us now. Although, worth mentioning I know so little about architecture that everything you just read is probably wrong.
With the blockout complete I finally have a pretty good idea of how much is ahead of me - turns out it’s quite a lot. I’ve been sure to be quite modular during blockout, and have been thinking a lot on utilising trimsheets, vertex painting, decals, and leaning on the now-free-for-Unreal Quixel suite, to the extent that I might only have 2 or 3 unique high-to-low baked assets. I also have two ‘hologram’ style transparent signs for the police cordon and the info ticker above the gates, which is sure to be a challenge to get looking decent.
BRB making assets for three weeks.