That Was The Week That Was — 2nd June 2019

This week was pretty laid back as I'm waiting on a contract to come through for a new piece of work which I'm excited to get going on. To fill the time I went back to a thing I'd been playing with in Houdini, using noise fields to create patterns on various 3D forms.

Originally I was just doing this on a sphere, and that was fine, but things started to get more interesting for me when I ditched the sphere and instead applied the same methodology to a flat grid. I could see the beginnings of some kind of city scape, albeit an electronic looking one. I started to dive down that particular rabbit hole, iterating on the code. I added a second noise field inside a point VOP, only this one would alter the height at various places to give it more of a city skyline effect rather than everything being at the same height.

I find Instagram a good testing ground for new designs, and people seemed to like this series I was playing around with.

I finally landed on something I really liked when I used a B-spline curve to control how the height changes were used, allowing me to create low-laying areas and then areas filled with skyscrapers, using an art directional approach, effectively drawing in the feel of the landscape. I also made a group of random points above and below a certain Y coordinate and used that those points to place tiny little rectangles to give the impression of windows. The final effect was pretty nice. It's not going to fool anyone that this really is a cityscape — that's not the point — but it feels like some other place.

The next step is to look at getting some limited edition A1 prints made.