“The apocalypse didn't happen overnight. The world didn't end in a satisfying climax of explosive special effects. It was slow. It was boring. It was one little thing at a time. One moral compromise, one abandoned ideal, one more justified injustice. No dramatic wave of destruction sweeping across the world, just scattered spots of rot forming throughout the decades, seemingly isolated incidents until the moment they all merged.”
― Isaac Marion, The Burning World
This is my entry for @juliakponsford's Art Explosion contest, this week themed "City" ... It is the first time I am participating and I'm quite happy to be doing so, finally! =)
Moonlit Dystopia
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What I did:
Those of us who create art using fractals know that it is an amazing medium for creativity, where the possibilities are literally infinite. Usually, the way things are done is, you search the chaos for something that "speaks to you" and give it substance.
It's actually almost like being a photographer, except you have super powers to be able to mould the world you're looking at, and manipulate the light in whichever way you choose, to then frame and shoot a perfect "shot".
So usually, themed contests aren't a favourite for us. The process of an idea first and execution afterwards is kinda backwards for fractal artists. But for this, I had an idea =)
The theme immediately put in my mind a little program I discovered a few months ago called JSPlacement. It allows you to generate random heightmaps for use in 3D rendering programs, and the 'Metropolis' mode, even though still in an experimental phase, worked perfectly for my concept.
So I generated a few until I found something I liked, and then imported that into Mandelbulb 3D with the HeightmapIFS formula:
The buildings started out a bit flat, so I tweaked one of the parameters to heighten them:
And finally, I needed to find my frame... I zoomed in a bit and turned the camera slightly... I wanted the "city center" in the one corner, and two main roads to give some perspective.
I ended up zooming in even more, as you can see here, before starting to work on colours and lighting:
First things first, I wanted some hard shadows:
I then darkened the scene by lowering the gamma a bit, as well as the light intensity:
Next, some texture... To get the dystopian feel, I went with a real grunge-y image:
Foor moonlight, I changed the colour of the light source to a nice pale blue:
And finally, to get even more dystopian, and soften some of the harder edges, I added some smutty fog:
The final image also has a bit more darkening of the general tone of the image... All in all, I was very happy with the result, and hope that you are too! ^^
Thank you very much to Julia for hosting this contest... I hope to do more in the future!
Thank you for your upvote 💖
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A few recent posts of mine:
"Didnt Planet" - Gallery: Fine Art | "Paradigm" - Gallery: Motifs, and Contest Winners! | "Chocolate with Red Berries" - dIFS Pong with @welshpixie!
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If you'd like to support me further, or follow me elsewhere, I'm on these social media:
Patreon | Instagram | Facebook
My Bitcoin wallet address:
1DPGX72eQj5TNVpSG1grRMxVAaDuqGG2RL
All Images, Creative Commons License.
