Steampunk City - Maya

Details are slightly sparse on this one apart from it was modelled and rendered in Maya and features a city designed around the 'Steampunk' theme.

According to the wiki - Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction which came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

There is something about Steampunk cities that fits 3D animation so well:



The movie above was uploaded to YouTube by rkrehe20

See also Cities in Games - Midgar Visualisation.

Greeble a 3D City: Tutorial 1: Greeble Skyscraper

Greebles became a core part of our 'Fantasy Architecture City' a few years back - allowing details to be added to buildings quickly and easily. In a new series of posts we thought we would provide a walk through of how to quickly and easily create your own city using the Greeble Plugin for 3D Max.

For those new to Greebles - Wikipedia defines them as:

A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects. They serve no real purpose other than to add complexity to the object, and cause the flow of the eye over the surface of the object to be interrupted, usually giving the impression of increased size. It is essentially the small detailed technical part of a larger object. The detail can be made from geometric primitives, including cylinders, cubes, and rectangles, combined to create intricate, but meaningless, surface detail. Greebles are commonly found on models or drawings of fictional spacecraft in science fiction.

In part one we are going to build the skyscraper featured top right:

You will need:

1x Copy of 3D Studio Max (a 30 Day trial can be downloaded from here)
1x Greeble Plugin installed into your Plugins Folder

Time Required: 5 -10 Minutes
Level: Beginner

Step 1: Making a Cylinder

Create a new cylinder in 3D Max with the following units: Radius: 50, Height: 600, Height Segments: 32, as pictured below:


For those new to 3D Max the Cylinder object can be found under 'Standard Primitives' on the right hand side tab with the 'Arrow' Icon.

Step 2: Selecting the Polygons

We are going to give the cylinder some shape by using the 'Taper' Modifier, before we taper we need to convert the Cylinder to an 'Editable Poly' - simply right click on your cylinder and select 'Convert To/Convert to Editable Poly':


Step 3: Adding some Shape

Now our cylinder is converted we need to select all the polygons in order to change the shape to something a little more interesting. Go into the objects 'Modify' list - you will find 'Modify' next to the Create Tab. Expand the drop down list and select 'Polygon', now click and drag around the object and you will see your selected polygons turn red.

We now apply the 'Taper' Modifier which is under your 'Modify' list. We have used 0.4 for the amount and ticked the 'Symmetry' box to ensure the top and bottom of our skyscraper is tapered by the same amount.

Once your object is tapered right click on your cylinder and select 'Convert To/Convert to Editable Poly' exactly the same as last time.

Our object is now ready to be 'Greebled'

Step 4 Greeble

Select all your polygons again and on your ''Modify' tab scroll down and select 'Greeble'. Your skyscraper will be transformed from a dull cylinder to a slightly more futuristic building:


There are a number of setting that can be tweaked using Greeble, the standard setting should be fine but feel free to change the extensions, densities and type until you are happy with the result.

Step 5 Adding Detail

We can now add some quick detail to the roof by adding on 3 standard boxes:

Once placed select all three boxes and click Greeble again:


Greeble can be extremely useful, in little under 5 minutes a simply cylinder can be transformed:

The next step of the tutorial will cover using Greeble to build a complete city in which to insert your own fantasy skyscrapers...

See: Greeble a 3D City: Tutorial 2: The Cityscape

You can see our Fantasy City running in Crysis Game Engine via our Cities in Crysis: Sandbox Editor post.

Cities in the Crysis Sandbox Editor

Our city - built as part of the Fantasy Architecture project - is normally our first test point for importing into new engines. It provides a good test of the ability to cope with large cityscapes and real-time lighting etc.

With our work using the Crysis Sandbox Editor ongoing in preparation for a tutorial we have finally managed to embed the city into the game, as the movie below illustrates.



Working out a smooth work flow has been slightly more problematic than planned with crashes and reboots an added 'feature' to the development. With a bit of patience however it does work. The movie above is work in progress but the engine is coping well with extending the city to almost the horizon.

Below is the city imported into the Oblivion Engine for way of comparison:





See our Oblivion Tutorial for the above, we should be able to get the first Crysis tutorial online next week....

SketchUp City

SketchUp is almost custom made for creating fantasy cityscapes and continuing our series of SketchUp Cities we feature a movie uploaded by shady110:



We like its style, also nice to see the Bank of China crop up in the model - possibly one of our favourite buildings - see our Flickr Pool for a panorama of the Bank of China we captured last week.

You can download Sketchup from http://www.sketchup.com