Appopolis — city backdrop
Four passes
Built to the production brief in Blender and Cycles. Backdrop only. Seven archetypes reused at scale, one hand-drawn monument, every window a flat emissive quad, nothing boolean’d — fourteen objects in the whole scene.
Pass 1
Silhouette
Geometry, camera, ground. Nothing else.
Failed its own test twice. The foreground was a wall across the bottom third, hiding the skyline it was meant to stand in front of. Then the horizon: a level camera puts it dead centre, and shifting the frame to move it pushed the buildings’ bases out of the picture. Worked out rather than nudged — a level 72mm camera 26 above the water and 302 back has a half-angle of 7.98°, so the base sits 4.92° below the axis, the waterline lands at 81% down, and the monument leaves 18% of sky. No shift, and every vertical stays vertical.
Pass 2
Windows
Emissive quads. Nothing modelled, nothing boolean’d.
Sized as a fraction of the facade they came out as portholes, and a narrow tower and a wide slab ended up with windows of wildly different size. They are absolute now — a window is about a metre across wherever it is, and taller than it is wide — on a fine grid, roughly a third lit, with a whole floor dark now and then and a whole floor lit end to end.
Pass 3
Lighting
Key, rim, and a little of its own for the monument.
The brief says very low intensity and it means it. At the first setting the buildings turned into flat tan blocks and lost the silhouette — the one thing the picture is built on. Cut to a fifteenth. The key is here to find an edge and a top surface; the windows light this city.
Pass 4
Atmosphere
Volumetric haze, bloom, grade.
Where it stands. The bloom on the windows and the reflection are doing the cinematic work. The gap: the background rank is fully occluded by the main one, so the layers-disappearing-into-atmosphere reading is not there yet — the haze has nothing behind the front rank to act on.