Ankh-Morpork

As promised, this week's post takes us to the fabled city of Ankh-Morpork. I hope you followed my advice and packed a nice shiny pair of nose plugs. You are going to need them. Actually, make that two pairs, they tend to corrode quite quickly.

Since I'm doing a full environmental scene again, I'm going to start with the ground. I hope I'll be able to nail the camera angle right at the beginning because it would make the gif progression easier to watch. After that is done it will be just a simple case of modelling everything else. Shouldn't take me more than half an hour, right?

***

Yeah, just positioning the goddamn plane took me about half an hour. So much for my time management skills. Anyway. I found a map of Ankh-Morpork and I'm tracing it as closely as I can. I'm using an image empty for that purpose and I must say that it makes it significantly easier than trying to copy it by simply looking at it. 

Also, I just used sculpting brushes (for the first time) to carve the circular shape of the city and the approximate position of the river. I then resorted to my favorite past time: shuffling vertices. The river is actually huge, it has two banks that need to be rounded AND then I shaded the banks around it so that's two extra rows of moved vertices. No one's gonna appreciate it but I feel really proud of myself.

Next I'm going to focus on the city walls and then the streets. All of these will need to have the vertices positioned carefully, so, yay! Shuffling time!

***

Ok, that was rubbish. Wherever I got the idea to model the city walls by hand? I started working on it, rounded a part of the wall in the lower-left quadrant, and then I thought that it was too thick. So I experimented with different ways of scaling it down (nothing worked, of course) and then I finally realized that there was a much easier and faster way. Just add a circle, extrude it this way and that way, and voilà, best city walls the world has ever seen (no need to mention the appalling lack of interest the world has shown in city walls. Give it time, it may still come around).

After my masterful wall trick I proceeded to clean up after myself, which took about hundred times longer than building the bloody wall. But I've discovered that there is an "Unsubdivide" command, which is nice. Oh, why was I unsubdividing, you ask? That's because I had looked ahead (I thought) and created enough polygons to make streets later on. But now that I know you can *add* geometry (wooow, I know), I'll just extrude them from a plane and enjoy doing it, for once.

***

Alright, streets are done. They resemble spider's web more than a city right now but bear with me, it will get better. I also added a bit of green for the parks and blue for ponds.

Oh, and I covered the city with mud dirt. Although I'm not sure if it's the right shade of dirt. Does anybody know what is Ankh-Morporkian dirt made of? Because I don't. I'll leave it as it is for now and maybe I'll do something more interesting with it later. Right now I need to focus on adding the houses. There has to be a whole lot of them so I'm going to torture myself with particle system settings again. Oh dear.

***

Eh. Have I ever told you how much I hate particle systems? No? Well, then. I really— Bah, you get the idea. After frantically pushing all the buttons, I coaxed the houses into standing up correctly. (The stage where they were lying around drunkenly was especially funny. If you like that kind of thing.) Then, to prevent them from intruding each other, I made them grow from vertices. Which revealed particularly painful issues with the city ground mesh.

In short, it was a big mess. A result of invasive river-shaping and unsubdividing, some areas were highly unsuitable for urban development. There was no other way about it than redo many faces manually (I tried fill and grid fill options but they either didn't work at all, or created even more nightmarish tangle of faces). I captured the glorious moment for future generations, so... have a look.

It reminded me of the time when I was trying to learn knitting. Only I didn't use a knife then. Still, it was a joyful couple of hours.

When I was finished, I tried to figure out how to stop the houses from sprouting on the streets and in parks and ponds and... everywhere where decent houses have no right to be. I followed Blender Guru's city tutorial for a bit. In it, he simply removes the vertices that represent streets. Not a good idea, at least in my case, so I quickly patched up the hole and started from scratch.

Eventually I braced myself and ventured into the terra incognita. Also called "vertex groups" by some. (A very small minority. For some obscure reasons, the term never caught on). Before I figured out how the 'Assign' and 'Remove' options work, lots of swear words were buzzing around. But once I finally did, it worked pretty well. It's not perfect but it is as good as I can make it right now. You can compare the initial settings with the trimmed result below.

And now that I have the houses, I think I'll add some trees, colour and shape the ground around the city and add the sky.

***

Ok, so I've done all that and now I'm struggling with the forest particle system. It just looks too random. I'll have to adjust the vertex group to make some interesting shapes. Oh, and the trees? I created two new ones and stole borrowed two from Wyrmberg. All in all, they make a nice variety of foliage. (No shrubs, sadly, but I'm on tight schedule as it is.)

What remains now is taming the forest, adding a few trees inside the city, and creating the Tower of Art. How hard can it be?

***

The end is nigh! Erhm. Near. The end is near, and I'm nearly finished. While fighting the forest, I decided to add some fields in the foreground. That should make it look more like a town and less like a forest retreat. The Tower of Art is now proudly overshadowing the city... Alright, alright, it is not *that* big because when it was, the upper part was drowning in the forest.

The last thing I have to do is adjust the light and colours. I'll probably change the sky—Ankh-Morpork in the morning might be more aesthetically pleasing than Ankh-Morpork during mid-day...? Well, let's see what I can come up with.

***

Finito, my friends. And not too soon either. I should really start working on the projects earlier in the week. Anyway, you have seen the final result at the top of the page so this place at the end of it belongs to the gif. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do because I made this one especially long.

And as for the next time? I think this is going to be the last part in my Discworld series (at least for now), so I'll need to find a new theme—and probably style, too. I don't have anything specific in mind yet but I'm playing with the idea of sculpting. But what to make... Maybe mythical creatures? That might be biting off more than I can chew, though. Ah, well, I'm sure I'll think of something. (But if you have any ideas, feel free to share them in the comments below.)