Behind the Scenes: Cyberpunk City (Patreon)

I was looking forward to get back to cyberpunk theme for soo long :) I did something similar more than a year ago and this time, I wanted more detailed environment with smooth shaded surfaces. 

If you're not familiar with the genre, it's a futuristic dystopian setting, in which large corporations control the world and people, there is a large gap between the wealthy and the rest and bionics, drugs and human enhancement implants play a huge role in everyday life. And for some reason it's always dark, rainy and with colorful lights and Japanese signs everywhere :) 

Most of the inspiration to do this, came from the anticipation of the Cyberpunk 2077 game. I just loved how they took the genre and played with colors. When I saw the first game play trailers, I loved how cyberpunk doesn't have to be only about the blue and pink anymore. I still love that combination of course, but I wanted to enhance it with full color spectrum.

I hunted for references and there is so much of cyberpunk stuff out there. So I got to be a little picky and took only the best stuff. You can clearly see the different inspirations I used in my scene. I included some architectural shots and I loved the idea of old columns with arches and at the same time, I was looking for older building designs with some pipes, tube, signs and cables. 

I loved how the yellow lights gives the gold quality on the bottom right image, so it served as a main light reference. And when I saw the tree in the lab, I immediately knew, I have to do another greenhouse like on the martian colony before, but built into the city as a park or something. At last, I looked up some car designs and the Porsche illustration inspired me to remake my Pontiac KITT model into retro-futuristic sports car.

This sketch took a little longer than usual, because I went through some layout versions first until I landed on this composition, similar to my Rome alleyway design. If you closely compare this sketch to the references, you can see, how I then filled the empty spaces with all the stuff I prepared. I went a little bit back to references and added some more details, like the clock display on the shop window, air conditioning units and japanese signs. Please, forgive me, if you're from Japan and I wrote some horrible things here. For the modeling phase, I actually researched some real signs and used those instead :)

Speaking of sighns, I basically just traced them form some images in illustrator (mostly just using blob brush) and imported to blender as SVG to extrude. And there are of course some other modeling shortcuts I used, like the sapling tree generator addon to create a tree or using a grease pencil to draw cables on the surface and coverting them to curves with geometry.

Have a look yourself :) 

So that was the cyberpunk city scene for this week. Thanks for reading and I hope it will help you with your next work.