Occupy Outer Space -
Arecibo Mike -
2721: Preternatural Skyscraper
I cheated a little bit and used Tinkercad to make the first level of the building. I got frustrated with how objects in Blender transform from the center, so I resorted to the easier software. I used the floorplan of my dorm room as a place to start, removing the exterior walls and punching in windows. In Blender, I copied the first level 11 times, rotating each level 90 degrees. Then I used the warp modifier to twist the entire object. I like the contrast between the rectilinearity of the microcosm and the curvature of the macrocosm. I made a long rectangle with light planes and ran it up the center of the object, so the tower would be lit from the inside. For the background, I stumbled upon the Wave Texture option under World Properties and messed with the Distortion and Detail settings to get the crazy waves. This background led me in a more abstarct diraction than I was originally planning. At first, I wanted to cover the horizontal surafaces of the tower with grass using a partical system, but my computer couldn't handle it. I used Cycles to render the images. It takes longer, but it looks a lot better than Eevee. It was tricky working with the virtual camera in Blender when trying to capture a sense of scale. It wasn't intentional, but the interior shots ended up reminding me of M.C. Escher's work. Ideally, I'd want to animate the camera through and around the tower and render it with cycles, but considering it took five minutes for my computer to render each for these pictures, it might not be practical.
I cheated a little bit and used Tinkercad to make the first level of the building. I got frustrated with how objects in Blender transform from the center, so I resorted to the easier software. I used the floorplan of my dorm room as a place to start, removing the exterior walls and punching in windows. In Blender, I copied the first level 11 times, rotating each level 90 degrees. Then I used the warp modifier to twist the entire object. I like the contrast between the rectilinearity of the microcosm and the curvature of the macrocosm. I made a long rectangle with light planes and ran it up the center of the object, so the tower would be lit from the inside. For the background, I stumbled upon the Wave Texture option under World Properties and messed with the Distortion and Detail settings to get the crazy waves. This background led me in a more abstarct diraction than I was originally planning. At first, I wanted to cover the horizontal surafaces of the tower with grass using a partical system, but my computer couldn't handle it. I used Cycles to render the images. It takes longer, but it looks a lot better than Eevee. It was tricky working with the virtual camera in Blender when trying to capture a sense of scale. It wasn't intentional, but the interior shots ended up reminding me of M.C. Escher's work. Ideally, I'd want to animate the camera through and around the tower and render it with cycles, but considering it took five minutes for my computer to render each for these pictures, it might not be practical.