Streets, Roads, and Highway Interchanges

As I started working on the city again I knew that I would have to start getting a sense of scale beyond "really big." Being the center piece, I started with the citadel. 

Drawing inspiration from the Burj Khalifa:

And a bit from one of my favorite Disney movies, Fantasia:

It's a quick moment from the first piece of the film but it's stuck with me for a long time. The animation taking place along the later part of Bach's "Tocatta and Fugue in D minor." 

Mind you this is the only concept I've made for it, it is likely to change. The smaller buildings surrounding it will be reduced to three honoring the three gods.

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Once I settled on the scale of the citadel I could move on to the city planning. After doing some research of street sizes I was able to create a scale that I could use in Photoshop, which came out to be 1 pixel = 2 feet. This way I could make an accurate representation of street width and block size. 

I also wanted to make sure I took into consideration traffic flow. Coming from the experience of driving around Boston, I tried my best to avoid that nightmare. Aside from a few areas I was able to keep traffic direction very simple. Street layout and traffic direction are very much like Manhattan.

To quote the hilarious John Mulaney, "It’s a grid system, mother fucka’! Where you at? 24th and 5th? Where you wanna go? 35th and 6th? 11 up and 1 over you simple bitch!"

This is what I came up with:

Arm:

- Dark center strip = highway -

Center:

 - Gray circles = citadel buildings, blue = moat (tentative), green = garden/park -

Everything together:

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Now to my favorite part. While planing the street layout was fun, I wasn't expecting highway interchanges to even better. So much so that, if it isn't already thing, I'd be up for create a trainspotting sub culture, where instead of traveling to see different trains, we'd travel to experience different interchanges. Dorky I know, but there are some really cool ones out there.

As stated before the dark gray lines in the center of each arm are multi-lane highways that converge at the center, providing easy and quick access to each part of the city.

The complete highway system:

Placed in the city:

To get from arm to arm using the three way interchange in the center would be best. To get to other parts of the center area, taking one of the four way interchanges onto the rotary using off ramps to get back into the city.

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Designing the interchanges was fun and challenging, my favorite kind.

I started with the four way. The traditional (and boring) design:

But that's pretty lame and requires a lot of space.

Now this?

Fucking cool. Resembling a Celtic symbol? Even cooler. Time to build in Maya!

I start with a single curve, then using a function called "duplicate special" I am able to create three more identical curves. What makes this duplication "special" is that using this method I can edit one curve and the duplicate curves repeat the edits on them selves in real time. In short, what I do to one thing is done to the others.

From there I can tweak the curves to make sure they are just right. I'm not kidding, this takes an embarrassingly long amount of time. When it comes to curves or poly-flow, shit has to be perfect. Will the viewer notice? Probably not. But I will!

Once the curves are perfect, I extrude some 3D geometry along them.

Tweak the heights and you get this:

The three way interchange was a little more tricky. You don't really find three highways coming together like this so finding a real world example proved difficult. What I did find was some builds from various city building simulation games (Sim City or Cities: Skylines), albeit shitty and low resolution.

This is what I came up with:

Pretty good right? Curves were nice. A cool design. Ok, good to go. Moving on.

Wait a minute... What's this?

A triangle? Everyone loves a good equilateral triangle, am I right or am I right? Shit, it's not straight. Must. Have. Perfection.

Should it point up?

Or down?

Well if you point it down, there's be a more interesting dynamic between the two shapes shown below.

Down it is. Twisting to get the triangle pointing down contorted the old roads so now I had to start over. 

New curves:

New geometry:

Done! Here's a breakdown of traffic flow. Hopefully the color coding reduces the confusion and allows you to see where ramps go with looking like a tangled knot.

It's a huge image, click it so you can see the details!

There you have it. I'm very please with them and it was a lot of fun to make. Oh, did I mention you won't actually see these interchanges? Yeah, they're all beneath the city as tunnels, so, that's kind of sad. It'll look cool on maps though. Plus I'll know and that's what matters most. :)

It's been a while...

This is going to be a long post, so let's get started!

First, here's that time lapse I promised. It's about 2.5 hours of work compressed to 4 minutes. It's really, really fast, mostly because the early "blocking" are suppose to be fast, so you can get a quick layout that you can use to add the detailed bits later.

This was really fun to do. Plus, I've never been able to see myself work as a sort of spectator. I really recommend doing a time lapse of you working on your hobby; it provides a perspective that I really can't find the words for... except neat. ... ? Introspective? /shurg

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Now to the nitty-gritty shit of where the hell I've been. If you want to get to the cool 3D bits, skip ahead.

Anyway, since leaving RIT and finishing the painter, I kept up a bit with my 3D, doing some work here and there, but it quickly teetered off after the Planet Express building. In the past year, I didn't drop my 3D work completely... but for all intents and purposing, yeah, I had given up.

I had decided to settle for a "normal" life. Get my associates degree in something that would most likely provide a good career, probably something IT related. Work, get married, have kids, retire.

Most people seemed to think that was a good idea. Seems reasonable right? Nothing wrong with that kind of life. I don't mean to disrespect anyone by what I've said, but for me, that meant giving up my dreams.

The wake up call came from someone I did not expect. If anything I would have thought he'd be most on board with the "responsible/practical" choice. I told him my plan, and he was the first person to call my bullshit. I don't remember exactly what he said, but what I got out of it was that he thought it would have been really sad for me to not do what I had wanted to do for so long. It would be a shame for me to give up then and never do what I loved most.

The guy who told me all of this was my Dad.

Thanks Pops :)


So here we are, over a year later. After living at my parents in Loudon for a bit, kind of figuring stuff out, I moved back down to Boston. I got my job back at Mahoney's, which isn't bad. Sure, it's not in my preferred field, but it'll do for now.

What now? I'm not really sure, still figuring some things out. One thing's for sure though, I am going to pursue my passion, video games. What part of video games? Programming? Art? Design? We'll see. For now, I'm going to keep at the art, see where that takes me. I'm not going to worry about what will look better for a portfolio; I'm going to work on what excites me, otherwise I don't think I'd get anything done.

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So! Onto the cool stuff!

First a little backstory. This next piece is a conceptual design for a major city in the universe that I've been world-building for quite a long time. By a long time I mean, the story that started it all was last saved to a floppy disk.

It slowly evolved from a derivative story of clone soldiers into a complex and (hopefully) original sci-fi universe, with a hint of fantasy. Some of you know a bit of the story.

The city belongs to a theocratic society. To put it very, very simply: the society had to leave their planet and find a new one. On this new planet after their initial settlement they erected this city as a monument to commemorate their achievements and to offer thanks to their gods (of which there are three).

Back to the design: I have always been inspired by "scale-shock." Which are buildings, sculptures, landscapes, etc that are on such a large scale it's, well, shocking. Some examples would be The Wall (Game of Thrones), the Death Star (that's no moon), and Eve Online's spaceships (home to the 18 km Titans). But I think this scene from The Fellowship of the Rings best demonstrates scale-shock.





Small disclaimer - The following images, at this stage, are extremely crude. Most are all screenshots taken directly from within Maya. It's too early for them to look pretty.

The idea started as "a city on a bridge."

Version 1.0 started as a pretty lame, giant Golden Gate Bridge, but it got the creative juices flowing.

See arrow for since of scale (those are average building heights of 5-ish stories).

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Version 2.0 - "What if the landscape (see arrow) was on the bridge!?" ... No, too big. In the middle you can see the concept for the citadel (more on that later).

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Version 3.0 - Ok, let's chill out a little. Simple and elegant. This version stuck with me for a long while.

This version would span across three peninsulas or across a bay with an island in the middle.

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Version 4.wtf - I was really just spit balling with this one... don't ask. What it did do for me was bringing my brain way from the traditional two sided, symmetrical bridge.

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The final (probably) version.

First an idea of the scale. The tower in the center, the citadel, is about 4000ft tall. The Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, is 2722 ft. Surrounding it, clustered in the center would be the taller skyscrapers, the rest of the buildings getting smaller the further out they are.

Remember the three gods? Yeah, three arms, three gods... bam.

To get a better sense of street layout and block sizes I quickly created the model below. Each block is roughly the size of an average Manhattan city block.

So, where's it going to sit? For a while, the landscape would have several rivers converging at a giant sink hole that the city would sprawl across. Shown here, in a super crude, cartoony illustration (I'm no concept artist).

At the end of the rivers (light blue) would be large, beautiful waterfalls.

With the sink-hole idea, there was one major problem... where does the water go? There could be a massive cave system I guess. I worked out some lore-friendly explanations... but in the end, it wouldn't work. Plus wouldn't it be better if there was access to the ocean?

Yes, yes it would.

Tada! Ocean access.

Next a simple 3D representation. The city expands beyond the bridge (all the green).

Ok, that'll do for now. I wanted to add a lot more, but this post is long enough as is. Plus it's 1:30 am.

Tomorrow I'll have lot's more! Including the most exciting part: highway interchanges! Oh yeah, interchanges baby.