Last night I ran into the tedious nature of planting trees in various places throughout my set to obscure the fact that there are only twenty actual buildings or so and I decided I wanted to try the flocking plug in to try and alleviate my boredom with constantly rotating and scaling the same model time after time.

The problem is it really didn't work. The trees all looked exactly the same and they appeared inside the geometry of the existing models.

So I came here to ask a question about flocking to see if there were any solutions and was offered a couple which I will explore shortly.

But since I was held up at that point I decided to take stock of where I was. Also to give my contributing artists and actors something to look at. Sort of a status update.

Man I have a lot of work to do.

I have to decal or decide on surface properties for a ton of buildings. I have fire escapes and balconies to build, along with cars, at least one truck, a dumpster or two. And windows. Oh my lord the windows.

If I choose to decal stuff I will in fact, first have to create the decals. No easy trick for a non artist.

All of that said, I'm pretty excited by how well this is going. I've been having a couple wierd errors involving models I've altered in muscle mode but other than that it has been silky smooth.

Anyway, here is a flythrough of where I'm at now. It's about 44 MB so I uploaded it to my Mediafire account instead of the server here. I don't want to take advantage of a good thing.

Any comments, thoughts, criticisms and suggestions are welcome.

I'll probably work on the fake outer walls and skydome next. Having no talent for art and not understanding how something like a curved object (the dome) can be made to look like a straight on view of a city skyline (my mind just can't seem to parse the perspective trick) I'm concerned about getting the look of this right before I start really detailing all the little stuff.

And the lighting. I still have to figure the lighting.

The render was done in Quicktime in preview mode with so so resolution so don't expect perfection but I'm pretty happy so far.



http://www.mediafire.com/?tvf3z2yxamy

Looking good Rob!



I'd say most don't try to apply a city skyline to a dome. That would be more appropriate for skies and areas with deep volume.
Perhaps mountains in the distance and so on.
Rather I'd suggest using one of the following inside your skydome:

- Rendered out image of the skyline with an Alpha Channel to allow the sky to show through
- 2D model of the skyline (a facade)

You would only set up these 'cards' at the locations of 'filming'.
For an shot from above you might consider using an image as often done in filmmaking and use a static matte.
Then rather than fly through you might rather zoom and pan into where the action is after establishing the shot.
Example: You might find a nice image on google and use that as a temp/garbage matte.
Adjust that matte as needed to set up your shot.
Apply the matte as an overlay/rotoscope with rotoscope's On Top setting set to On.

That looks promising!

You should probably pick out the places your camera will actually be in your story, and then you'll only need to polish the stuff that is seen from those angles.

I have been toying with the idea of mirrors.seems you could use mirrors to make a treeline a forest.
Perhaps this would work for a cityscape too?

Mirrors? Please, elaborate.