Megacity Skyline and Structures

  Getting back into design I had the incentive to look at a few building ideas. Although for experimentation I might try something more...familiar. Artstation has a new challenge going on so I might try that, get some practice looking to the days of the Old West.

  It'll be far less monolithic than this weekend's drawing, far less colossal but as a period before the kind of construction we know today it's also an avenue for more characterful architecture.

Huabanyouliu: Revising an Old City

As I looked to the future I had a suspicion that I may be looking for a job for a little while, so to keep my skills sharp I went back to an old design, the city I built in my first year with fresh ideas to make it more convincing. Maybe more expansive or more true to something Philip Treacy would design, as while the key buildings are certainly Trracy-like, I feel the rest of the cityscape could do with a more true-to-his-work look.

It's only a blockout so far, but going back to my inspirations I have a few new ideas for the city's layout.

  I went back to my old inspiration, the Zhangjiajie Forest National Park in China where the city was nestled in the pillar-like mountains to look for ideas on layout and construction. Maybe the mountains form part of the city itself. The original city's design involved many platforms, elevated psaces for people to move and interact. The mountains provide a perfect preface for such vertical construction, a foundation as the city reaches out into the air, it's people rooted in the rock but living among the clouds.

  Key structures will be installed, of course - the opera house and some of the platforms will remain as they are symbolic features of the design as it was during my final submission. I might not get to populate it, or expand it as more than an empty city once vibrant, but it's a wonderful exercise to fill empty time.

Zhangjiaje, in particular some rock formations that might work very well in the revised city. (Amusing Planet, 2015)

References

• Amusing Planet, 2015; [Zhangjiaje, in particular some rock formations that might work very well in the revised city]; zhangjiajie; available at https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtoRrCKClHbHehbqdH2JRo_BKEbVicoS9rzqapdDKGSq1vYbmYx-K2pfMtxtllS_LmboW8M3n_bDTWtH-Jnz2F27WFiRrbn3FGEDRBTWDD9kMRYVFcXIhW_k1nx0373FOFZ_byjlJdXBRH/?imgmax=800 (last accessed 13th September 2017)

Personal: Landscape Sculpting practice

  It's been on my mind to recreate the city from my What If Metropolis project for a few days now. So what I considered doing was a digital sculpture of the landscape that surrounds the city and the focal point could be the city centre.

  In retrospect however, this landscape could be used as a location for the Ceti base for the major project. The ground in the centre is mostly flat and the environment around the bas ewill only be seen twice: During the company's advert (which will focus more on the base itself) and when Four emerges from the base airlock to see the outside world for the first time.

Sketchbook: Plotting a Course for Year Three

  With the hot late-July Summers hitting the country I had the chance to explore and head out into the sun. During a trip into London I got back into sketching, The drawings on the left-hand side of the above image were life-drawing attempts on a miniature of a fountain commissioned sometime in the 18th century. The drawings on the right of the top picture were partially inspired by the kind of outfits that became popular at that point in time, a time when English dress (termed Côte Anglaise) was very popular on the continent.

  Later on I thought about refreshing my character design skills, building an understanding of humanoid forms that are not strictly human-like in proportion. The structural sketches, done today, were based on how I felt after last Friday's art-stream session. I tried a hand at map-making, as over the past two years I have found I like an analytical approach to designing something be it a character or a world. And city maps can demonstrate a location's character (I had the good fortune to talk about this in detail on the stream), something I may try developing further in my third-year project.

  However as the half-finished nature of both suggests, I lost steam during the broadcast. Whether or not I will work on them again will be something to decide, but the lack of momentum I felt has made me inclined towards finishing the Minotaur painting half-made on the stream before this one.

(Yes, sketch 14 is an attempt at Totoro. I am quite fascinated with Studio Ghibli's works)

Art Stream: Cityscape Concept

  The product of a three-hour stream. If anything this was an attempt to get my mind back into actual digital painting since aside from the concept art for Legends of the New Year, I hadn't picked up a stylus for Photoshop for anything more than silhouettes.

I suppose the buildings at the bottom could have a lot more done to them. There are still a number of rough edges and I might need to look a little into building layouts next time in order to make something a little more organised.

Adaptation B: Solidifying Iobe's look

   Over the weekend I looked into some ideas for city architecture or layout for Iobe Cavern city, with further drawings being made today. What I know of the planet itself is that it is a desert on the surface, light comes in from the cavern ceiling and some of the areas are indicated to be grand locations. So over the weekend I looked around the internet for images of ballrooms, facades, row houses, skyscrapers, near-equatoral cities, modern cities and boom towns like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Shanghai.

  There might be something here. I was intrigued while drawing by the image of buildings that had entrances at different heights; one foyer on a ground floor, and then another to open out to a street on a higher platform. Perhaps there are buildings that rise though cantilever platforms.

  Veppers' bedroom might be another  key environment to model. In the story he heads there during his visit in order to secretly travel by shuttle to a station hidden within the system's Oort cloud (a shell of icy rocks around a solar system, the source of comets). I imagine it to be lavishly decorated in a high-class style, with the large circular bed positioned prominently due to Veppers' opinion of himself.

  ALso tried thinking of some possible logos for the Veprine corporation. As a mega-conglomerate I might go for something simple, comparable to the Nike tick or Apple's part-bitten apple.

Adaptation B: Iobe City Aesthetic - Part One

  So far it appears I have a green light for adapting ''Surface Detail'', but the primary question that exists is what Iobe city actually looks like in terms of architecture. Aside form describing a bridge as 'ornate', Banks wasn't clear but he did leave clues dotted about.

  The first is Veppers' involvement. Veppers holds the position of "prime executive" of the Veprine Corporation. Given his arrogance and ideology that the self-made man is king, it is possible that the Veprine corporation is named after himself. What the corporation does however isn't cut and dry as throughout the book, Banks makes mention of the resources Veppers has at his disposal, and it appears that the Veprine corporation's interests include laboratory work, cybernetics, starship engineering, artificial intelligence and, oddly, tourism. Essentially Veprine is one of these can-do-anything conglomerates. Veppers is also so well-connected politically that it is possible the Veprine corporation has international clout. Chapter 19 makes mention that Veppers has numerous commercial interests in Iobe City such as ownership of the city's grandest hotel. So  in a sense his business has influenced the evolution of the city. The existence of a private hotel room cut into the rock on the top two floors, as well as a tunnel to a secret hanger, make it seem unlikely that the hotel was bought out by Veprine, upgraded and remodeled. This sort of engineering is best done during construction unless Veppers went through the trouble of buying out one of the wallside hotels, made it the best hotel in the city and built his secrets later. This seems too coincidental to be likely.

  That brings us to the technology and level of wealth of the city itself. Fair enough that there are a few buildings hanging from the ceiling, but the suspended ballroom is one of the more iconic examples outsiders would see of Iobe engineering. This structure is a premier social gathering spot hanging under the largest cavern opening by cables from the ceiling and possessing an iris-shutter roof in the primary  dance hall. So whoever commissioned it undoutably had a lot of money and Iobe's builder community would need some heavy-duty innovation to manage it. The other thing that struck me was the mention of how fliers (sphere-like flying cars) are moved about the city. Banks mentions that pilot-operated flying vehicles are banned in the city due to various incidents of destroyed civil property, the compromise used for the flier Veppers and his party ride in is that flying vehicles are "tethered to tracks in the cavern roofs and controlled automatically." (Banks, pg.357). These tethers are mono-filament wires that are attached four to a craft. Another example of complex engineering as the caves would effectively cris-crossed on the roof by metal rails holding something between a hundred metres to over a kilometre down.

  The third sign of technological capability is revealed when Banks explains what keeps the mercury simmering.

  "the volcanic activity wasn't natural either; several hundred thousand years earlier - long before the Sichultians arrived on the scene to find a happily habitable but sentiently uninhabited planet - a hole had been drilled down through many tens of kilometres of rock to create a tiny magma chamber that heated the base of the cavern and so kept the mercury simmering." (Banks, 2012, pg.361)

  When I first tried to understand the paragraph I was impressed but mistaken when reading that this chute was deep enough to perhaps reach the planet's mantle (real life drilling attempts have managed as deep as a little over 12km) but nothing like an artificial chamber underneath). But the paragraph also reveals something: The first colonists (or at least the discoverers) were Sichultians. But given the name (Iobe) compared to the only other non-Sichultian being in the chapter, Xingre, its possible that the name is Sichultian.

  Page 367 reveals another engineering quality: An underground network of private roads, practically all of which lead to buildings or facilities owned by Veprine with some going outside the city. Infrastructure like this implies that Veprine essentially has an iron grip on the city's commerce, as an engineering project like this would require significant investment, planning permission and foresight.  Perhaps also a little backroom dealing, given one earlier attempt of Veppers' to buy a Jhultian military vessel. But the prevalence of Veprine in Iobe would explain why the city authorities were the ones who organised a reception for him as Veppers would be a local benefactor. he might even have friends on the city council. But what this does suggest is that Iobe could be quite commercial, a tourist destination given the hotel, city bridges and ballroom and could be a prime source of business for Veprine.

  Thus, I am imagining busy city lights, billboards, parks, shopping centres, theatres and hotel chains being a focus, architecturally though, as well as lights I did wonder if the city's architects could have been inspired by the caves in which they live in: Sligthly organic but maybe a glistening quality to the material.given there is a central river and wet karst caves become quite glistening. Maybe a slight Arabic vibe, as Veppers has been described wearing a billowing cloak at times, there is some interest in chromed windows and mutipurpose pillows that can float: Xingre and his lieutenant sit on ones that feature translators and  Veppers' bed is a giant circular thing that features more floating pillows that can extend monofilament cables to hide what's going on inside the bed. Although that last one could simply be a disguised security feature.

One character under Veppers' care is also kept unconscious by a drug dispenser bulb on her neck disguised as an insect. An important note of this feature is that Veppers liked the visual touch (Banks, 2012, pg.367). Although he may have been primarily attracted to the innocuousness of a tranquiliser injector that looks like a tiny resting bug.

@Alan Adaptation Project: First-Look Extracts

  I feel exited about the new project.Speaking with Alan today I decided to look at what books interested me and pick out a few sections that I could possibly develop into an animation. The extracts below do have other accompanying text, but since I have considered focusing on environment design for this project the environments are what take centre stage in these extracts.

The first two are from the space opera novel "Surface Detail", a Culture-series installment by Iain M. Banks.

The second two are from the Memoir-style adventure tale "A Natural History of Dragons, A memoir by Lady Trent" by Marie Brennan.

  She tried to remember the size of the opera stage. She had been here a handful of times with Veppers and the rest of his extended entourage, brought along as a trophy, a walking model denoting his commercial victories; she ought to be able to remember. All she could recall was being sourly impressed by the scale of everything - the brightness, depth and working complexity of the scenery; the physical effects produced by trapdoors, hidden wires, smoke machines and fireworks; the sheer amount of noise the hidden orchestra and the strutting, overdressed singers and their embedded microphones could create.

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   Only afterwards - mingling, paraded, socialising, exhibited - had she realised it was really just an excuse and the opera itself a side-show; the true spectacle of the evening was always played out inside the sumptuous foyer, upon the glittering staircases, within the curved sweep of dazzlingly lit, high-ceilinged corridors, beneath the towering chandeliers in the palatial anterooms, around fabulously laden tables in resplendently  decorated saloons, in the absurdly grand restrooms and in the boxes, front rows and elected seats of the auditorium rather than on the stage itself. The super-rich and ultra-powerful regarded themselves as the true stars, and their entrances and exits, gossip, approaches, advances, suggestions, proposals and prompts within the public spaces of this massive building constituted the proper business of the event.

--Surface Detail, ch. 1, pg. 5-6

  Veppers, Jasken Xingre, half a dozen others' of Veppers' retinue plus the Jhulpian's principal aide and a medium-ranking officer from the Ucalegon were sharing a tethered flier making its way through one of the great karst caves that made up Iobe Cavern City. The cave averaged a kilometre or so across; a huge pipe whose floor held a small, winding river. The city's buildings, terraces, promenades and boulevards rose up from the riverside, increasingly precipitously as they approached the mid-way point of the cave, where buildings became sheer cliffs; a few went even beyond that, clinging to the overhanging curve of the cavern's upper wall. The flier tether-rails were stationed further up still, cantilevered out from the cave's roof on gantries like a sequence of giant cranes. A series of enormous oval holes punctured the roof's summit, letting in great slanting slabs of withering Vebezuan sunlight.

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  The flier zoomed, rising to avoid a high bridge barring their way. |----| Iobe city had banned flying machines entirely for centuries, then allowed fliers to be used but suffered one or two accidents which had resulted in the destruction of of several notable buildings and brized historic cross-cavern bridges, so had compromised by allowing fliers but only if they were tethered to tracks in the cavern roofs and controlled automatically.

--Surface Detail, ch. 19, pg. 356, 357

  This stood cloaked in pines nearly as tall as the ancient stones, but the trees had no foothold on the gateway itself. The central figure strode out boldly on an outcropping of solid rock, its huma nfeet planted on the ground, its draconic head staring though the clear mountain air toward Chiavora. Vystrani winters had been harsh to the mighty sculpture; its features were so eroded as to be almost indistinguishable, and the lintel of the right-hand passage had fallen, leaving the unknown god with only one wing. The damage somehow made the figure moreinspirinf; nowadays we may carve as large as the Draconeans - the archangel in Falchester is even larger - but no amount of artistic "weathering" can counterfeit the sheer weight of time.

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He went on talking, something about double gateways, so characteristic of Draconean architecture, and theories as to their purpose (My favourite, the one promoted by Mr Charving, the great urban reformer; that the Draconeans regulated traffic into their settlements by guiding arriving riders and carts through the left gate, and those departing through the right. It is utterly fanciful, as no one has ever discovered evidence of sufficient traffic at these ruins to require such measures - but as Mr. Charving parlayed this into a very successful scheme for the regulation of traffic in Falchester, where it very much was needed, I cannot but applaud his rhetoric.)

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  A little further inward lay the pylons of the temple's front wall, too massive even for time to collapse them. Like the right-hand half of the gateway, the lintel between them had fallen, and an accumulation of debris and dirt raised the passage to nearly a third the height of the wall. Astimir assisted Lord Hilford up this slope, then bent to aid me. My skirts caught on the undergrowth, and one wicked thorn tore a long rent in the fabric, but I did not mind. From the top of the passage I could see into the hypostyle hall, now open to the elements, the thin stones of its roof long since having relocated to the ground, where they lay nearly as buried as the paving in the courtyard.

--A Natural History of Dragons, ch. 12, pg. 179

  I knew little of the menagerie, except that the king's late father had established it on spacious grounds downstream from Falchester, and the son had spared no expense to see it stocked with every exotic creature that could be persuaded to survive in captivity. It existed primarily for the entertainment of the royal family, with occasional public days, which I, growing up in rural Tamshire, had no chance to experience. As Andrew could guess, a tour was a rare treat for me.

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  The tour was disappointing in its organisation, for people wandered in and out of the various gardens and glass-walled rooms. few paying even the slightest attention to Mr. Swargain's speeches. I wished very much to listen to him, but didn't dare single myself out by being the only the only one to attend to his words, and so I caught only snatches before we stopped before a pair of very grand doors.

  "in here" the naturalist said, in ringing tones that drew more eyes than usual, "we keep the crowning jewels of His Majesty's collection, only recently acquired. I beg the ladies to ahve a care, for many find the creatures within to be frightening."

  One may measure the extent to which I had cut myself off from my old interests that I did not have the slightest clue what the king had acquired, that lay beyond these doors.

  Mr. Swargain opened them, and we filed through into a huge room enclosed by a dome of glass panels that let i nthe afternoon sunlight. We stood on a walkway that circled the room's perimeter and overlooked a deep, sand-filled pit divided by heavy grates into three large pie-slice enclosures.

--A Natural History of Dragons, ch. 3, pg. 45-47

  At present I am perhaps most drawn to the description of Iobe Cavern City, an underground metropolis from Surface Detail. Although while it only serves as a means to set the location, the opera house described in chapter 1 of the same book is also appealing due to the elaborate, if perhaps somewhat broadly-described interior architecture. At one point in the chapter there is mention of a town-house and personal estate owned by Veppers but that only appears as the woman the section's perspective comes from momentarily wonders if he was moved after being drugged (she wasn't moved, merely confusing a theatre backdrop she lay against for a new environment).

  At first I thought there was an entire section describing the city of Falchester, but this was not the case for two reasons highlighted in the book that both come under 'not relevant':

• Lady Trent was in Falchester to take part in Courting Season, and the conventions of the season never interested her. So she only covered events that were relevant to her expedition to the Russia-like nation of Vystrana.
• As a memoir of her life for students or fans, Lady Trent writes little of Falchester likely under the assumption that if you want to learn about the city, you're probably reading the wrong book.

  While there isn't much detail in one place, there is fortunately enough that a loose image of the city can be constructed: City parks, wealthy districts, a giant archangel statue, one or more city gates, dual carriageways running through the centre of the city, a central river, plenty of social venues for the courting nobility, outlying parks and a royal menagerie downriver. All with a lively annual season where the nobility flocks from all over. The combination of a peerage magnet and royal property were what made me assure that Falchester is the national capital.