Hi, everyone. Hope you're all doing well. I thought I'd share with you a little bit of what I'm up to today and relay my thoughts on a few things. I've been creating some custom motion graphics animations every day, the purposes of which are to keep my skills sharp and also to provide my social media channels with some content. Today I had the idea to challenge myself with a speed modeling session which would consist of creating a futuristic, "Tron" style cityscape, using a retro Synthwave neon aesthetic. Of course, there's really no challenge if there aren't limitations.

So my plan was to start the day by "quickly" modeling about four or five dozen "ultra-low-poly" buildings in Blender, then use Array and maybe Scatter to position them repeatedly on a pre-structured ground plane grid, complete with streets and alleys. Then I'd set up a few light-cycle type objects flying down those streets with my camera animated along a path. This would ultimately be about a 10 or 20-second clip which I could then loop endlessly and post up on Instagram or Youtube as a "VJ style" looping animation.

I started this project about noon today, and after just a few hours of modeling, I've hit a proverbial creative wall. I never anticipated modeling just a few dozen simple buildings could be such a challenge! I seriously doubt I'll be able to finish this in time to post an animation by midnight. I think the biggest obstacle is actually dreaming up unique and interesting shapes for each building while limiting the polygon count to only 50 faces for each object (there may be one or two which exceed that by a few polygons), but without repeating too many building types. After about a dozen buildings, I had already started to run out of original ideas. I've even looked at a few addons which claim to generate shapes for you, but most of those exceed my polygon requirement, so I'll just keep doing it manually.

Here's what I had as of about an hour ago...

So if anyone wants to challenge themselves with a fun little project, I highly recommend trying something like this. Give yourself a time limit of perhaps 12 to 24 hours, then limit yourself to just 50 polygons per object and see if you can come up with 72 different buildings in that timeframe. Maybe I'm just getting old, but this was a bigger challenge than I thought. ;-)

Like what you got so far I do not know if this might be of any potential use or give you some more option using a the particle system to scatter and create of sorts city and then modifying your already existing geometry by small modifications to create more randomness I saw this and just seemed to associate on some level with what your challenging yourself with just a thought

Particle City - Blender 2.81 - Part 1: Generating The Particle Buildings

Lux, your project reminds me of projects folks are doing in the Blender class I'm taking at Udemy. Most do a LP version first, and then if they want to, do an HP version as well, and a good many of them are scenes with buildings, though not necessarily skyscrapers. Some are doing farm buildings and such. It's been fun watching what folks can come up with starting with a cube and then extruding.

Lobo that link looks very interesting indeed. I'm definitely going to have to try it once I get into Blender 8.x.

What you probably need to do is start working with permutations of what you've got. Take the bottom section of the first building in the second block, and put it on top of the first building in the first block. Take the top half of the first building in the third block, and put it on the bottom of that building and tweak it so its four pillars. The fifth building in the first block, keep the asymmetrical slope for the center part of the roof, but make the slope around it symmetrical, and change the "notch" on the side to a hole thru the building. Mix 'n' match, use chunks of them as prefab parts for more buildings.

Any time you're dealing with a large set of objects like this, the more different you want each one to be, the fewer options you can create. You're going to have to accept some level of overlap, and find the way to use that to make your work easier/quicker. Once your city is populated with buildings its going to become more "textural" than anything, so it won't matter as much how different they are from one another. In fact, you could make a case that being TOO different from one another might be a detriment in that the really unique looking buildings are the ones that are going to stand [jump!] out the most in a looped sequence, making the loop more obvious than it might otherwise be. You need to find a balance between how different do you want them to be, and not making each building stand out too much.

Really liking the look of your render so far, makes me want to play along. I've been REALLY digging the synthwave/vaporwave aesthetics lately myself.

Warlock279 posted at 11:42PM Fri, 03 July 2020 - #4393795

What you probably need to do is start working with permutations of what you've got. Take the bottom section of the first building in the second block, and put it on top of the first building in the first block. Take the top half of the first building in the third block, and put it on the bottom of that building and tweak it so its four pillars. The fifth building in the first block, keep the asymmetrical slope for the center part of the roof, but make the slope around it symmetrical, and change the "notch" on the side to a hole thru the building. Mix 'n' match, use chunks of them as prefab parts for more buildings.

Any time you're dealing with a large set of objects like this, the more different you want each one to be, the fewer options you can create. You're going to have to accept some level of overlap, and find the way to use that to make your work easier/quicker. Once your city is populated with buildings its going to become more "textural" than anything, so it won't matter as much how different they are from one another. In fact, you could make a case that being TOO different from one another might be a detriment in that the really unique looking buildings are the ones that are going to stand [jump!] out the most in a looped sequence, making the loop more obvious than it might otherwise be. You need to find a balance between how different do you want them to be, and not making each building stand out too much.

Really liking the look of your render so far, makes me want to play along. I've been REALLY digging the synthwave/vaporwave aesthetics lately myself.

Yep, Warlock279, that's exactly how I decided to attack the issue after posting. I will post the finished product here later today, but needless to say I didn't finish the project in the time I gave myself. It ended up taking me a good 24 hours to finish, although I did get interrupted several times and had to stop for about 12 hours for a different project that popped up. This was only for fun anyway. I'll post the animation once I mix in the sound. I never did ultra-low poly shapes like this before. It was very interesting. I did modeling for games and also for baking to low poly retopology, but never objects which were under 200 polygons. It's definitely a different experience that I totally underestimated. I'm also one of those guys who never ever considered booleans as part of my modeling techniques, but in this case, booleans came in extremely handy.

I'll post up the vid probably later today or early tomorrow.