To start generating ideas, I collected inspirational images for a mood board. I focused on a mixture of realism and concept art to create a wider variation of references. I narrowed my focus on streets in Japan and China as I feel they closely fit with my chosen theme. From exploring futuristic city concept art, I realised that attention is drawn to lights and advertisements while the buildings are mostly plain, I hope to replicate this in my own work to achieve a cyberpunk effect while referencing real life to make my scene look believable.
To develop on my mood board, I produced a few sketches to visualize the basics of my scene. Every concept art scene involved a ‘hero asset’ in order to give a sense scale which I hope to include in my own scene.
When reviewing my sketches, I asked my lecturers and peers which one they felt was the strongest and many agreed on sketch A and D therefore I tried to merge the two into a focused sketch.
I used my sketches to start blocking out my scene but I was finding it difficult translating the 2D sketch into 3D. I realised after attempting a few block outs my approach wasn’t working. My compositions felt uninspiring so I went back and collected more focused references to solve my problem.
During my deeper research, I came across this street in Shanghai and thought it was perfect to use as a reference for my scene. Nanjing road is the eastern part of the main shopping district of Shanghai, it is one of the world’s busiest shopping streets. This meant that in every image there is plenty of life to reference. I also liked the fact that I could see the entire street and zoom in on certain details thanks to google maps.
As a consequence to my deeper research, I was able to confidently block out my scene and achieve a stronger composition. I referenced Nanjing Road heavily during this stage and slowly started adding my own elements. I felt this was a strong base to start adding cyberpunk aspects to the scene. I ensured to plan out spaces on the buildings to add digital screens similar to my mood board references.
I started to flesh out my scene by adding bigger buildings in the background and rails in theme of the cyberpunk look I was hoping to achieve. I began adding smaller details to the scene like lampposts which help give the scene a sense of scale and makes it look more realistic.