Building the city

For the architecture in the street of my animation I headed out into the city with my camera and took photos of various buildings, so that I could pick between various elements of them and combine them to make my own building. I wanted the Marvel building itself to have an archaic quality about it, to emphasise the old way of doing things, and to contrast with the modern towerblocks beside it. I found an archway in Leeds uni that I really liked as the main door to the Marvel building.















I took the above pic into illustrator and turned it into a graphic using the pen tool, then added it into my building front.

























I wanted to have glowing lamposts in the street as it's supposed to be night time. Rather than tracing out one from a photograph I made my lampost using illustrators 3D tools. I was really impressed how you can make a 3D graphic from a single line draming using the revolve effect.

























I created the main post and the head of the lamp seperately so I'd be able to lay the glowing light between them. I'm really pleased with the final result, and the lamposts add a nice bit of atmosphere to the street.



As for the buildings themselves, I've now realised I went about their creation in a rather backwards fashion. I transformed some rectangles into 3D objects using the extrude and bevel effect, and then created graphics for the building fronts. I created arched church style windows for the marvel building to keep with the ancient look I wanted, and they juxtapose nicely with the billboard style Marvel sign mounted on the top of the building. I then used the map art option to add them to the faces of the 3D towers. Afterwards it became clear to me it would have been much simpler, and would have looked slightly better, to just use the extrude and bevel effect on the building front graphics I'd made. Still, learning the long way round's better than not learning at all.