A few months ago I started experimenting with placing domes over cities, for no other reason than I thought it was a nice effect. I like the idea of containing these miniature city dioramas within a glassy dome, the dome creates a nice cut off for the city geometry and the reflections of the transit data on the glass dome are kind of mesmerising.
The below city examples show an evolving style, from a simplistic view of Los Angeles to a more complex representation of Tokyo.
Los Angeles
The first in the project and I think the only one which I stuck on a little plinth. The light trails represent an hours worth of bus activity in LA and the buildings are extruded 150% to create a more dramatic scene. Clouds exist as vdbs and the windows in the cities were generated using the method from here: https://mapzilla.co.uk/work/window-cities
I guess the idea here was to repurpose some of my old city scenes to present them in a new light.
Tokyo - Shinjuku District
Tokyo was far more ambitious and resulted in a much busier model. The buildings were sourced from: https://www.geospatial.jp/ckan/dataset/plateau and existed as .obj models sitting on some kind of terrain. As all my examples here sit on a ‘flat’ surface I needed to sink each building to the ground plane - this was tricky. The whole model is huge as well, I’ll include some screenshots below.
In addition to the usual buildings, roads and transit data I have little red aircraft warning lights on the tall buildings, trees and even little procedural street lights. Oh I couldn’t find detailed enough transit data for the Shinjuku District so I used some random routing to create the illusion of motion. This project was more about create little domes so I wasn’t too bothered with using real data. I also rendered out two version for this a night and day aesthetic. For me I think the day still wins out but I do like a dark scene!
New York City
This version was a little different from the others because my focus was to create a reveal within the dome. I utilise the same kind of data as previously although this time the transit data is routed NYC Yello Taxis for a few hours. The scene starts off with a wavefront type animation building the roads/vegetation and the building and dome shortly after it.
I also experimented a little with a crash-zoom on the light version which turned out pretty nice. I also tried to create this one in time for Day 11 of the #30DaysMapChallenge which I couldn’t resist taking part in!
Sleepy Hollow - Halloween Edition
As Halloween fell when I was creating these domes I decided to do a little version of Sleepy Hollow within a glassy pumpkin dome! Cheesy but kind of fun!
