Rooftop development // part three // Saville row

Conception & Exploration: After hours of researching countless internet resources and meandering the streets of Leicester I was influenced by a handful of inspiring images. Having established a Parisian cityscape for my environment, there were a number of other sources which could help further develop my concept. For example when the Beatles surprised a lunchtime audience with an impromptu concert on the roof of Saville Row in 1969. Their last and most famous concert that is perhaps one of the most iconic music events of the past 40 years. From a visual and cultural perspective, this sort of event changes the very nature of a rooftops purpose, instead of a functional, industrial platform; it becomes a stage. This was the kind of twist I wanted my environment to embody. 


Naturally this sort of idea progression lead towards looking at musical equipment and their practical applications. Thanks to Red Tape Studios in Sheffield, I was able gather an invaluable source of photographic materials.

As a result of deciding a final concept and before constructing my own vision if it, I had to develop my technical understandings of how I could go about creating a large-scale cityscape, or at least, the impression of one. At this point, understanding contemporary gaming mechanics and exploring recent title artwork proved a valuable experience in generating production work-flows and final asset listings. For example, the screenshots below are taken from the game Deus:Ex: Human Revolution. Not only does this game represent a vast array of rooftop scenes, the art direction is also something to marvel. The skyboxes in particular are a show-stealer, they illustrate a wide horizon filled with soaring skyscrapers and alpine advertisements. An artistic feat to be envious of.

With this vision of a sweeping skybox, I embarked upon a journey of exploring different methods to create my own cityscape to put into UDK. I researched a number of methods, Handpainting in photoshop, rendering a realtime scene in Unreal and using a refract/reflect map in 3DSmax. Using some placeholder objects and textures I was able to experiment with spacial positioning, perspective and overall colour of a distant horizon, the following images were the result of my experimentation: