I made Circle Ward 27 as part of my ongoing learning process in Blender.

I have reached a level where I actually find it faster to mock up a scene in 3D than draw everything from scratch, which is a good boost to my workflow.
I have always used 3D as a block out for big environments even in studio, but I always relied on 2D for the final result.

Being more confident with Blender means unlocking a whole lot of subjects I hadn’t bothered with so far.
For example, drawing the aerial view of a big city like this in 2D would mean days of painstaking work, unless one doesn’t resort to completely different workflows like photobashing and matte painting, or goes for a much, much less polished and more “impressionistic” work with just brushes and patience.

I resorted to a couple of awesome add-ons for Circle Ward 27.

The main one was the great BlOSM (Blender Open Source Maps), which allows you to pull any city in the world from the OSM database and import it into Blender.
Well, at least a small parts of them, if you don’t want your graphic card to blow up.

The learning part here was about texturing each building, for which I did a “meh” job to be honest.
Next time I’ll use displacement maps to make them look less flat, and maybe add some reflections and specularity to the windows.
I wasn’t going for a production-level of quality here, so that’s good enough for now.

The second add-on that I’m really getting fond of is SciFi-FLEX, which cuts down by A LOT the tedious and repetitive process of creating and scattering panels and greebles.

I also did a mediocre work here. By the time of writing I got a lot more competent with it, and next time around I’ll use displacement maps instead of the hundred thousands polys I scattered around here.

I still did quite a bit of overpaint and editing in 2D using my trusted Krita, I don’t think I’ll ever turn into a 3D artist any time soon.
I’m basically a Concept Artist who happens to use 3D.

Anyway, I’m having huge fun working with Blender.
This was done in my spare time while learning new features (to me). For my freelance work I’m already completing a huge scene for a Star Trek illustration that it would have literally taken weeks if done in 2D from scratch.

As it happens in publishing I won’t be able to post that for months, so you’ll have to trust me on that for now:)

by Paolo Puggioni