Cardboard city, part 1

We haven't had a two-part project in a while, so let's try to pull one off, shall we?

Since my beautiful pumpkins didn't win anything, I lost all love for art contests. So much so that I've decided to participate in another Weekly CG Challenge. I didn't mean to, but the topic was irresistible. "Cardboard World, you say? So I can build a whole city without learning to draw, or running the risk of cutting my fingers with scissors? Count me in!" 

(Oh, I'll have to create a ton of stuff to make this look believable and I'll definitely overreach myself again...? Awesome!)

I love creating stylised environments. And this one should be a special kind of stylised, one that I haven't tried my hand at yet. For that reason, I spent most of this week concept proving. I think I now have a good idea of how to create the materials I need and the only thing that remains is to fill in the blanks. That should be a piece of cake.

To start with, I looked at a lot of reference images of cartoon cities. I don't think I've mentioned it here before, but I have, like many other people, found the joy of using PureRef. It's a fairly simple piece of software that lets you drag images into a neat board, which you can then keep on top of other windows anywhere on your screen. It can get slightly irritating when you forget to switch focus back to Blender, but overall, it's a time saver. 

But I digress. When I had a clearer picture of what I wanted to make, I spent a lot of time designing the city layout. I wanted to have a reasonable variety in height and shape, without unnecessary occlusions. I think I'm happy with what I have, but I've been known to change things substantially later down the road, so don't be surprised if it look very different next week.

To follow in the concept proving way of things, I created one complete house (or a hospital, in this case). I'm trying to create a believable cardboard playground, so I tried to imagine how you'd go about creating a building like this. In the end I pushed the windows in, keeping them attached on one side. This created an interesting modelling workflow because I almost never use the "rip edges" option and now I got to use it ad nauseam. I also had to change the pivot to 3D cursor and reset it all the time, which turned out to be a lot of fun. Can't wait to make the remaining 10 buildings or so. (I sound a little whiny here, but it actually IS quite fun.)

With the modelling part done, I needed to unwrap the hospital. Which wouldn't be an issue if I also didn't need to apply the Solidify modifier (to be able to make the fancy cardboard edges later). I kid you not, I ended up unwrapping it four times before I was happy with the result. Partly because I'm weird, but mostly because the cardboard material is direction-sensitive and I needed to align things nicely.

Once in Substance Painter, I downloaded all available cardboard materials and went on to play with scaling, layering and hand-painting. The final material I've settled on has two kinds of cardboard, with procedurally identified and manually over-painted edges. On top of this beauty is a layer of spray paint and general dirt. I have to remember to dial down the glossiness of the paint, though. Especially on the road, which currently looks more like a duct tape than cardboard.

And there are plenty of other issues that need fixing. The lighting is bland, the wall is weirdly splotchy, the carpet is alright but I'll try ten different ones anyway... I'd better get working on that right now, huh? Well, see you next week, folks.