Lucy Week 5 - Workers City

9/2/2015: Day 1 – Finalising thin man colours

This week I wanted to start work on my second environment piece, the Workers city. Before I moved onto gathering reference, I needed to finish off the thin man design. I needed to decide on colours for his clothing. Seeing as he’s a member of the upper class elites, they have a set line of clothing that follow the same colour schemes and designs. These were designed by Ed at the beginning of the project, so I had clear reference and direction for the overall look as well as the colours.

I started with a variety of colours but mainly trying to stick around the original colour schemes put into place at the beginning. I still wanted to experiment with colour, just to see if we were missing out on anything, so below are the variations I came up with.

These are the final three I decided to mix and match. I felt these choices could vary within themselves so I went ahead and began to switch around the tops and the bottoms.

10/2/2015: Day 2 – Thin man final

So these are the final images for the Thin Man. I may go back into the headshot, I feel that the colours look a little bit washed out and need to be more saturated, but I’m really pleased with the final concept. It depicts his character well, I may try and improve the rendering but for now I really like how it turned out.

11/2/2015: Day 3 – Workers city reference gathering

For this environment piece, I’d already had a few ideas and worked on some aspects of the workers world with the catacombs environment. So using the previous reference and gathering more I began to formulate ideas (https://www.pinterest.com/ThomasJDixon/fmpminers/)

My first ideas were to do a market square type area, full of tall structures with a lot of bridges, to visually explain how the world is built one layer on top of another. Almost like the workers city was built into the foundations of the high rise complexes of the elites. I tried to do some sketches but found it difficult to form the ideas so I’ll continue tomorrow with some 3D modelling, for a white box to sketch over the top of.

12/2/2015: Day 4 – 3D modelling/work out world mechanics

I started the day with 3D modeling some scenes. As I went along I still was unsure as to what I was doing but below was what I came up with.

At this point, I was really struggling with being able to visualise the workers city. I asked Ed her opinion and she came up with the infer structure of the entire world. Below was a quick diagram that explained how she saw it.

 This gave me the understanding I needed to help understand my ideas. The main structure was how the workers get from the residential area to where they work. This was explained with the dark blue area in the diagram. They essentially are cable cars that have the seats stacked like a stair case, which the workers sit in.  They are situated on a ramp that then get pulled up into the working areas and to the heart machine. So the whole layout of the world was decided on and I began to try and 3D model a small scene that would show this.

Below is a progress shot.

 I then realized after doing this, I understood the layout enough that I didn’t really need to model the whole thing and just focus on the areas that have now been formulated. Today was spent solely to work out how the world works as a whole. Now with this knowledge I can begin to design specific areas that make up the workers city.

13/2/2015: Day 5 – Photobashing

I used the reference I gathered to generate ideas. I photobashed some images to visualise specific areas for the workers city. We broke these down into:

-Residential
-City (available food, crèches, schools etc.)
-Cable cars (to take workers to machine rooms/heart machine)
-Machine Rooms
-Heart machine

Below are the photobashed scenes.

 These have helped me understand the structure and over all look of these areas. I feel maybe I could try different levels of decor. As the elites above are in charge of these areas, I feel they may take better care of them, more so than how they appear in these scenes. This will be something I’ll explore later on, maybe try different levels of ware for some scenes.