Confluence - Blender CON 2022 - Establishing Shots
Blender Conference 2022
Saturday 29th October - 10:00am Amsterdam Time - 9:00am UK
"Procedural Fantasy City Creation Using Geometry Nodes"
"The evolution of Geometry Nodes in Blender has enabled the creation of increasingly larger procedural projects and setups over the past year. This talk focuses on the construction of a fantasy city from basic building blocks.
Starting with a simple idea, a city layout and terrain are generated, buildings are grown from the ground up, populated with props and shaded procedurally."
I think I finally more or less wrapped up the preparation for this, so here's an advert(?). I believe you can tune in live to watch me forget my words in real time! I made a whole bunch of paintings, breakdown videos, WIP progress shots of this, so hopefully it'll be a fun watch.
Tell your friends, family and neighbours dog to tune in!
I was lucky to have a really cool ref photo for the Atmos/lighting, from my Himalayan Sunset Mountains pack
Sometimes an image comes together really quickly as if by magic. This was absolutely not the case, went back and forth a lot until I found a colour palette that felt right.
Could probably use another couple of passes of polish, but perfection is the enemy of progress.
Blender Conference 2022 Presentation
Reasonably good representation of what the raw renders mostly looked like before I hid the ugly bits with Atmos.
City is grown outward from a central ring, towers scattered on it, then several loops of bridges extending from towers towards more towers to create the city itself. Central plaza area from Google3D data. Cliffs grown from bottom faces of the towers.
Procedural castle buildings that conform to the underlying tower structure. Top faces of the towers taken, used to extrude out the buildings, stairs, fences etc
Procedural house setup with the houses generated from the underlying floorplan. Here I draw the floorplan manually, but in the city it's generated from the top faces of the tower structures.
Different seed versions for the city layout. Top left was the chosen one. Goal was to have a simple base with fractal type natural looking growth.
Cliffs grown downwards from tower structures. Usually of course a city layout is dictated by the underlying geometry, but here I did it backwards
Simplified View of towers-bridges-towers-bridges-towers loop.
Central plaza taken from Google earth, Plaza de España, Sevilla.
Spent a little time on an ocean shader but not enough to be truly happy with the result. Part of the reason being that making it more complex was killing my laptop, and it was something that I could cheat a lot in DMP anyway
Ref. Alhambra, Jodhpur, Bhaktapur, Gwalior