Cyber City
This film was made during the CS371: Computational Graphics course at Williams College in the Fall of 2014. Videos were created and rendered using the open-source C++ G3D Innovation Engine with original cinematography, design, and open-source music.
This short film features a procedurally generated city illuminated by neon lights designed, modeled, and rendered as part of a midterm group project. I was responsible for creating 3D models that were used as building blocks for the buildings in the city. Given a set of these building blocks, we defined an algorithmic grammar that combined and recombined these small units to produce a single building. I also led the team in developing a unified artistic vision that carried through to the final film.
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Our group made strategic decisions for the two week span of the project in deciding to split up into teams that focused on creating the basic primitive building blocks, generating each building, generating the plan for the entire city (ie. where to place each individual building), and writing scripts and an interface to manage the entire process.
I worked on modeling the terminals in the grammar - each building was generated by combining and adding individual building blocks in unique orientations:
Windows, for example, looked like this:
Because each building file became so massive, we needed to be strategic when placing each building in the 3D scene, to save memory and to optimize compute time. Our solution was to first create a proxy city made up of simple rectangles, and then copy the locations of each dummy building to the real city. During filming of the video, we created a method for defining spline curves followed by the "camera" in the proxy city, and then we transferred the camera movements to the real city.
Having highly collaborative and dedicated team members allowed us to recognize when we needed to scale down our efforts in certain areas. We worked together to stay on track throughout the project and complete each component of the project in a timely manner.
Dummy city:
Spline curves to set the path of the camera as it flies through the city:
