EDIT:
I've added another building in-between the two I already had. It is just asmall Arched entrance. All of these are based off buildings on Regents Street.
 


I've worked a bit more on the buildings for my Maya scene. Still have a lot to do.

The weakest part at the moment are the textures, I think I can get away with some quite simple textures with the odd bit of dirt as the lighting should help the look of the buildings. I know I'm using the space on the UV maps quite poorly, I should really get in the habit of making use of it, which I'll begin to do.




I quickly did a quick render to see how the texures look, which is below. I think with a bit more detail (Shop signs, pavements, posters etc. It will start to look like a proper scene.

The weather outside is awful today, snow-ridden and cold, so I've had an excuse to knuckle-down on this project. Another thing I've been playing with today is creating a road in Maya. Below is my first experiment with texturing, It's not a bad attempt, but I think it needs to be higher resolution. I've included the map below. What I am planning to do is split the road into two portions and put it side-by-side on the UV making the quality twice as good (As there is a lot of texture space wasted) The right hand side was originally going to be for the pavement texture, but I can always split the materials.

I wanted to get started in Maya on this mammoth task, It did concern me a bit that I didn't have my final concept finished before starting the creation, but overall, I think a bit of modelling will help me out with the camera angles and deciding what objects I want to incoporate into the scene. Below are the objects I have created, I still have a lot to go, including the daunting double-decker bus.

28 Days Later, released in 2002, begins with the main character; Jim waking up in hospital to find the city of London seem empty. The plot develops into him realising a virus has killed many people and turned the rest into raging cannabals or modern zombies. I watched this for the umpteeth time yesterday and focused on the first few scenes for inspiration of my concept.


A few days ago I posted about the book 'Day of the Triffids' which also takes a similar view at post-catastrophe London. In this post I looked at the TV drama that aired over Christmas, along with some images of London in the mayhem. This is also inspiration for my scene.

Last week I had, what I thought, was a good finished piece of concept art set in the surroundings of a rural farmhouse but since then I've lost the motivation to work on it. I started to create it in Maya and I didn't think it was interesting enough and I thought it had very little excitement to it. I decided to start from scratch with a complete different concept, something more original and of a larger scope. I've decided on a new idea and I am well into the creation if it. I'm working on the concept piece at the moment, but first I will post up my references and inspiration.

I want to create a scene on a central London Street, in a Crewdson type image. The street will be desolate, a double-decker bus will be crashed into the side of a building, the store-fronts will be smashed and the ground will be covered in information leaflets (Which the viewer cannot read) The background will be digitally painted showing smoke rising throughout the horizon.

I have two and a half weeks, meaning this is probably far too ambitious, but I might as well give it a go. I've been working a bit backwards on this project, I haven't created a resolved concept piece, just plans of where I want objects in the scene, I know which objects I will definitely use, so I have modelled them first.

I'l post up my progress this afternoon.

I thought today I should start work again on the project, as it has been a week and a half of doing very little. I'm happy with my theme and setting so now I am playing with the composition. I want the view to be subjective, which is why I want a realistic camera angle, I want to get this all sorted in my concept so I can put modelling effort into the things I know will be seen and skip those that won't.

I started working on a concept today of viewing the house from inside a barn, with a subjective view that seems as if the camera is 'spying' or hiding and shouldn't be there. I've put about two hours work into it so far and I am using maya to help with the perspective. It is far from finished but I'll post up my progress.

I've just finished reading the sci-fi novel 'Day of the Triffids' by John Wyndham and I thought it was worth a post as it is a fantastic apocalyptic story. First published in 1951 it centres around a man named Bill Masen, a bio-chemist who awakes in hospital to find almost everybody in the country (If not the world) blinded by a 'comet shower'. Bill was one of the only people to retain his sight as he had just come out of an eye operation after being stung by a 'Triffid'; a large carnivorous plant which is able to move.

After realising the predictiment he is in, Bill embarks on a journey of survival as well as attempting to re-build a life after this catastrophe. The reason I really liked Wyndham's plot is because of the harshness and brutality of the story. Explaining the complete despair, confusion and suffering that most of the population experiences after their sight is taken away. The story is not centered around the deadly plants, but rather the state of the country and the apocalyptic happenings. The Triffids are very secondary to the plot and really only come into main focus near the end of the book. The events throughout include suicides, disease, starvation as well as questions of religion and feminism. The scope of the book is amazing. Bill sets out to find a woman he meets and looses shortly after the catastrophe happens; Josella. The book was turned into a BBC radio series in 1957.



Coincidenally, there was a BBC adaptation of the book in two-parts which started last night and concluded today. I had no idea this was being aired until it was advertised a couple of hours before it was on. Luckily, I was only about 20 pages from the end of the book, so I finished it and looked forward to the series.

The BBC remake, was in my opinion a great attempt at conveying the book. Adaptations into TV and movies always seem to miss the mark, but in this case I thought it was very well done. As this was a modern re-invisioned version of the novel,  there were a few changes, such as the Triffids being used as Oil to solve 'Global Warming'. A main part of the plot that was changed was introducing the character of  'Torrence', played by Eddie Izzard. The character only features in the book briefly, as a un-named villain (Until the final few pages) but in the drama he is a main character who influences the plot and creates even more mayhem. I understand why they expanded the character, as it made a quicker paced story and gave a villain to it. Bill's father also appears in the series, whereas in the book, he was killed in an Airplane crash years before the incidents.



The Triffids themselves were also just as I imagined them, although they seem a little more deadly in the series, having vines which can drag humans away, whereas in the book they could just shoot the odd venomous spike and slash with their sting. They are still shown as quite slow-moving plants, but still very dangerous. Although the Triffids are the base to the story they aren't the main focus of the drama, like the book, it is more of a apocalyptic story which they feature in.



I recommend the book to everyone, there are so many small details and sub-plots that it keeps the whole story very interesting. I have a large collection of Philip K. Dick novels to read, he is a science fiction author who wrote books such as Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and Blade Runner. I'm going to give 'Do Androids Dream of Sheep' a read, hopefully it won't go too far over my head.