I spent some time tonight on the city that my architect is working on. The cityscape is a combination of Stonemason’s Greeble City Blocks and an old set called the Dystopia City Blocks. The platform in the foreground is from The Core, another Stonemason creation. I spent a fair amount of time working on the city so that it didn’t look like every other future city that uses Stefan’s greeble blocks. But it still needs some work.

First take on the skyline

The skyline isn’t finished yet, and I don’t care for the lighting as it stands, but it is a start.

Time Spent

Approximately an hour actually working on things. Another 30 minutes or so was spent looking for things. 🙂 Neither the Dysotopia nor Greeble City Blocks had been installed yet; so I had to find them first.

Accumulated time: 5.5 hours

While this is a new project, the concept for it has been bouncing around in my head for years. It will be a sci-fi themed image with a young woman as an architect designing a building to fit into a city skyline.

I’ve had in mind before the idea that sometimes new 3D artists may not be aware of all the work that goes into some of the final images they see. They see some amazing artwork in a gallery, read that it was done with DAZ Studio or Poser and think “Oh, I could do that then!” So I’m going to try to chronicle the process that I go through from beginning to end with this. And provide some information about the amount of time it takes me to get to my final result.

I’m SURE that there are people who can do things faster than I do. And I’m a bit rusty after some considerable time away from the hobby. But I hope people find this journey interesting and informative anyway.

Alice

I’m using Alfaseed’s Alice character. So far, I’ve just been messing with getting the skin shaders to work how I’d like them. Lighting is pretty poor. Just two spotlights to allow me to see how changing the SSS parameters was affecting the image. I used Age of Armour’s excellent Subsurface Shader Basics Tutorial as a guide to the SSS shader in DS 4.6. I actually did the work without any hair on her, but I decided to put at least something there before I posted a shot. Probably won’t be the hair I use in the final image I have in mind.

Headshot of my architect

Time Spent

I spent a little over 2 hours on this last night. To be honest, much of that was just getting Alice to work properly. Alfaseed changed the way she works in this version from previous versions of Alice. The end result is easier to use, but the installation is more difficult. If I had read their installation tutorial FIRST, I would have saved myself a lot of time. 🙂