Some Real World Fantasy Eye Candy

[Legacy_henesua]

               

For my day job I am a landscape designer (primarily for schools). Nothing as interesting as some of the techno wizards that occupy this space, but I get exposed to some interesting visuals now and then.

 

There was a design competition for the Guggenheim in Helsinki that one of my coworkers shared around the office. Submittals have been made and there are like 1700 projects each with 2 renderings and a statements. Its all academic level stuff really which is another way of saying its all fantasy rather than real world stuff.

 

Some of them I thought might be interesting to the folks here

- This one is aesthetically off for the competition and gets the scale all wrong, but its still really cool, and  can almost vaguely be an abstractly elven architecture.

- This one has a cool biomorphic roof made out of wood cubes

- Some look like the temple of an evil over lord priest-king

- And this one in particular is interesting in that it tries to recreate a magical forest, and yet feels more like the dystopian artificial jungle of the hunger games because it is wrapped in a glass skin. Still I particularly like the concept and am wondering how to bring that idea out into the world.

 

anyway… enough real life. enjoy and get back to the fantastical imaginings.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

Liked the first one quite a lot. 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_rjshae]

               

Yes, a nice set of designs, although perhaps not always practical for most uses. '>

 

Elven architecture is often portrayed as organic in nature, with a lot of curved surfaces, arches, scroll work, and windows. Besides being more challenging to craft than blocky, closed, linear structures, I'd expect it also tends to be higher in poly count and likely requires more careful texturing and arrangement for proper aesthetic appeal.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

I love the biomorphic stuff. Gaudi can be thought of similarly although he refines his shapes beyond the purely biomorphic into something more. Gaudi's work is amongst my favorite. And yeah… biomorphic has curves and so that drives up polycount when you model it. Seems to me however that you can fake this by burning in shading in the texture to reflect a volume. The elven detailing however, yeah, details like that if they aren't purely textures can be a trick to get in game at a low polycount.

 

Meanwhile… I spotted this one which has some pseudo organic shapes. You can see the orgnic shape being expressed through industrial materials and building. Would be easy to model though. Simply forms like this following patterns are not too hard to develop.