The Clouds Will Soon Roll By

Here's a new large image from my world of Retropolis: it's called "The Clouds Will Soon Roll By", after a song from 1932 (Woods, Dixon/Lawrence). Because that's just the sort of future it is.

I spent about six weeks on the image. It started as a rough little animatic that used the existing monorail and city models. I did this as part of a pitch I was hired to work on, for a series of station IDs meant for a renamed and relaunched satellite channel. Unlike 99% of the pitches I've ever worked on (or heard of) this one was greenlit. Amazing! A week later, the network decoded they didn't want to rebrand the channel after all. Typical!

This scene never even appeared in the final pitch, but I'd gotten sort of intersted in it and I kept working away, thinking it'd turn into a print at about 18 x 24". But it started working so well that I decided to make it even bigger, which meant that I had to up the resolution on almost all its elements, and so like I said I ended up working on it for about six weeks. Even though I have an aversion to posting works in progress I did post a few updates on this one at my blog - [link] .

There are (I think) 21 characters in this final version. We see a group debarking from the monorail - and at least one passenger about to board - while up above, a construction crew is overseeing a couple of "Big Lug" robots, and in the foreground, we've got a pleasant evening party getting started on an art deco balcony. Retropolis itself fades off into the distance and we see that what we may have always suspected about this sort of City of the Future is true - it's a terrific playground for the birds.

As always, 3DS Max and Photoshop. I used guruware's free gwIvy plugin to generate some ivy, and also a plugin called "Info Overlay" to do quick composites as I worked on the scene - it was rendered as four separate layers. Another plugin called "ZTint" proved useful, too, in a couple of ways.