Book about hard surfaces

I received some time ago this brand new book called Blender 3D Incredible Machines. The book's written by Chris Kuhn who's one of my favorite Blender artists. He makes insanely accurate detailed vehicles and props.

The book covers intermediate and advanced modeling concepts in Blender using examples; making a scifi gun, spaceship and a robot. Most of the tools and techniques I already knew about but I did pick up some interesting new tricks. Great read!

Landscape progress

I've continued making the environment piece for the past week. Also tried to animate the sunrise just to see how things look in motion. Take a look below:

Pretty satisfied with the results so far. I had to composite the scene heavily to give it that painterly kind of mood. It all comes down to layering fog, adding overlays and color correcting the render to achieve the effect.

The city is procedurally generated using particles so it's easy to create different kind of layouts. It's actually not as simple as it sounds since there's different sets of particles for walls and roof to make them orient correctly. Had to figure that out all by myself. I made some lowpoly slum buildings that I could then instance all over the city. No textures yet, will work on that next.

The city itself is just simple blocks of buildings based on a map and then extruded up. There's also a lattice modifier to make it possible to shape the landscape nondestructively.

Environment blocking

Stuff from the weekend; this is a new environment piece that I'm working on. The instanced buildings are cubes for now. The clouds are volumetric CG clouds, don't think they're quite there yet. Work in progress.

Couple new art books

Got two new CG art books in the mail some time ago. The First one is called ZBrush Characters & Creatures by 3DTotal. It's pretty much what the cover art states; making monsters and alien creatures in ZBrush with the entire workflow explained. Having at least a basic grasp of ZBrush concepts is pretty much expected in today's industry so I might as well take a shot at it. I would definitly like to get more into sculpting organic things in the future.

The another book is titled simply Anatomy for 3D artists (also published by 3DTotal). It covers basic human anatomy with traditional illustrations and intricate 3D wireframes. Good stuff for understanding proportions, muscle structure and preparing models for better deformations.

I have also had the time to read an absolute classic about cinematography; The Five C's of Cinematography by Joseph V. Mascelli! The book has been recommended by a good friend so I finally decided to borrow it from the school library. Even though the book was originally published in the 60's all the elements of visual storytelling still apply in today's world. Super fascinating stuff!