BUILD A CITY METROPOLIS

AUTHOR

Adam Dewhirst

Adam Dewhirst is a build supervisor for Double Negative London. He has over 15 years of experience in VFX spanning games, film, TV, commercials and children’s television. Author www.instagram.com/dewhirstadam

PART 2/2

At Vertex 2019 I gave a talk called ‘How to Build a City in a Day’, and last issue we looked at ways to make your own kitbash pieces using the iPad software Shapr3D. This month, I want to take some of those pieces and turn them into a giant cityscape.

To do this we are going to be working outside of a conventional methodology, using plugins and pre-made setups to help us along. The purpose of this task is to rapidly prototype an environment that we could use for a variety of reasons – as a concept, for client approval on a job, for previs, or as a test for a much larger design. It’s a great way to visualise large structures in a short amount of time with little effort.

The key to this process is not getting bogged down working on the detail of a specific task, instead I’ll focus on tools that can speed up my workflow and allow me to rapidly create large complex structures. I won’t be working from a design, but creating something random(ish) from much smaller pieces I already have, and allowing accidents and interesting developments along the way to dictate the final look of the piece.

I will be maintaining an or mega city block as an overall guide for the look of my cityscape.