Cyberpunk City in Blender 3D - 2D/3D Process

Hey everyone, it’s Kevin welcome back to the channel! This is a scene I created in Blender 3D that features a city centered around all things speed. I completed this piece roughly a week ago and thought I’d do a breakdown on it, covering my process.

This piece was pretty important for me for 2 reasons. The first is that it’s my celebratory piece for crossing 100K subscribers. Honestly, I never thought I would ever cross that. So a huge thank you to everyone that continued to watch and subscribe!

The second was that this was the first time in a long time I created anything new. If you follow me on social media, you might’ve seen posts here and there of Little Maxwell or of Theo, my new easy care desk plant - say hi Theo. I do love working on those, but what I mean is a creating a piece that was challenging, allowing me to learn and experiment with new techniques.

For the past many months, I’ve mainly been using Grease Pencil and this was primarily due to work, so I wanted to explore other functions within Blender. I had previously created a city celebrating 15k and thought it would be fun to create another one.

So very top level, this scene is comprised of 3D meshes with a toon shader applied, supplemented with grease pencil and geometry node elements.

Concept

The idea for this scene actually came from just this illustration here, which is this character moving their glasses and the Velocity type underneath. Back when I made this channel 3 years ago, I was practicing my drawing skills, and creating a lot of different portraits. So, at the time, I thought to make one into an abstract illustration using grease pencil in Blender.

But, after sitting with it, I started to flesh out the idea more. I imagined it could be a moving billboard in a city. So, it grew from just this illustration to an entire environment. Then I thought about why Velocity and came up with a city focused on hyper-efficiency. And then it continued to “why hyper efficiency?” And so last year, I ended up building this entire world, narrative, and cast of characters with this city being one area in that world.

What was an accidental creative exercise turned out to be a very exciting process for me. This was a way for me to combine what I enjoyed making with a cohesive story. And I’ll probably expand upon that story in future pieces.

Story

So this city was once a haven of art and creativity, but it’s now transformed into one of innovation and progress. The introduction of an otherworldly and mysterious resource has enabled the inhabitants to reach a level of efficiency once thought unattainable. As a result, the city is thrust into a period of unprecedented growth, achieving over a century’s worth of advancements in just under a decade. This rapid growth is not without a price and an onlooker notices it’ll bring about many questions and challenges to come.

Process

The process began with revisiting what I already created which was an initial concept and a blocked out scene in Blender. This gave me something to go off of, but I didn’t really like the angle or direction. So, I went to Pinterest to look for more inspiration. I referenced a lot of cyberpunk-inspired art in addition to cities with late 1800’s early 1900’s architecture. I also referenced a lot of scenes from Akira the film, especially for the backgrounds.

Once I had that inspiration, I moved on to working directly in Blender. Usually, I first draw out a drawing a concept, but since I had something to work off of, it was easier to just start there. I set up my cameras and then began blocking out the scene. I did this on a livestream, just forming the main parts of the city and adding random shapes until I achieved a rough design I was satisfied with. Usually with a city, it can be a little intimidating to design from an illustration standpoint. But like any creative process, it helps to start very broad and then hone in with specific details. So, I went back over those meshes and added structural element, referencing the architectural inspiration I found. And most of the time, I worked with 2 viewports with the left being the Camera View and the right where I make all of my adjustments just to make sure the framing looks good.

Initially, I wanted an angle that was higher above the city but I decided to zoom it in since that would’ve taken a bit more time.

So, once I had all the meshes in place, I moved on to shading.

Shading

For shading, I wanted this city to be bright and vibrant. I love working with contrasting colors and I was planning on using a textured gradient shader which is the same one I’ve used frequently in my recent pieces like this Phoenix. If you’d like a more in depth breakdown, you can check out my simple toon shaders video below.

However, after working with it for some time, it does have a few limitations, especially in regards to lighting. Now I did find a workaround that I talked about in my Anime-Inspired city. But, I also wanted a way to add color non-uniformly so that I could create these dynamic gradients on the buildings. To do that, I ended up combing this shader with Color Attribute or what was known as Vertex Paint.

This was inspired by GAKU who is an amazing artist. A few years ago, I came across one of their pieces and saw that they used Color Attribute. If you’ve never used Color Attribute, it’s a process in Blender that allows you to paint directly onto the vertices of a mesh. And if you’re more familiar with grease pencil, it allows you to paint directly onto the points within a stroke. This is different from Texture Painting which allows painting onto a mesh, regardless of the vertex locations.

So, I experimented with that workflow in this scene using Color Attribute on the teacups. And if you’d like to check out that video, I’ll leave a link below. I could see how easy it was to setup and to use, especially for those interested in digital painting. It’s just that, at the time, it didn’t really fit my workflow because I was more interested in procedural methods.

But this time around, I felt this combination of a textured shader with color attribute would actually help me achieve the look I was going for.

Now the advantage of using Color Attribute is that it’s a lot quicker to set up. To get started with it, all you’ll need is a Mesh. And to demonstrate, here, I have a Suzanne Monkey. Going the Object Data Properties Tab and under Color Attributes, add a new Color Attribute by pressing the + button, and then click OK.

Create a new material, rename it to Monkey and bring in a Color Attribute node with Shift + A. Now, plug the Color Output into the Base Color Input of the Principled BSDF. Then, click on this box and select the Color Attribute we just created.

Go into Vertex Paint mode, select a color either in the Top Left or by Right Clicking. And then we can paint to our hearts content. So you can see how easy it is to add color, but again, the coverage is determined by vertex location.

So, in my scene, I’ve made a textured toon shader supplemented with Color Attribute. This was to add color in specific areas on some of the foreground and background buildings. And it allowed me to obtain that contrast I was going for. There are many things you can do with Color Attribute like masks for Sculpting or for adding Texture. And I’ll probably do some sort of tutorial that goes over this process more in depth.

Outlines

With the meshes modeled and shaded, I moved onto adding Outlines. Now, there are numerous methods for achieving outlines and the most notable ones being Freestyle, the Lineart Modifier, and Inverted Hull. And out of those 3, I usually gravitate towards Inverted Hull because it’s super easy to setup and work with in real time. It consists of adding a solidify modifier onto a mesh with normals flipped and a material with back face culling checked. However, it can be kind of tedious to set up and if you have different modifiers on different meshes, it not as easy to just copy only the solidify modifier to the ones that don’t have it. So I tried a technique to recreate inverted hull using Geometry Nodes. And I found this out from Levi Magony who is an awesome creator that has lots of videos on Line Art methods. And I’ll leave a link to their channel below.

But, creating the outlines with Geometry Nodes made this process simpler. Since the values were contained in a geometry node system, I could easily add them to specific meshes and adjust those values globally. I didn’t use this for all the meshes - I did use regular Inverted Hull in some cases, but incorporating this geometry node technique was super helpful.

Because the inverted hull method only works on the contours of the mesh, I added outlines manually with grease pencil to accentuate some of the geometry. And I usually prefer this so I can have control over its appearance and give it a more hand drawn look. I used surface stroke placement and added those additional outlines wherever they were needed.

Grease Pencil

After the Outlines, I moved on to working fully with Grease Pencil. This is where I was able to get really creative and add character to the city. Now, if you don’t know what grease pencil is, it’s an object in Blender that allows you to draw and animate 2D directly in a 3D environment. So, this makes it ideal for 2D/3D workflows. I generally like using grease pencil to create supplementary elements because it incorporates seamlessly into 3D projects like this one.

I really wanted the city to have a kinetic energy and this was an opportunity to do that through the signage. As I mentioned earlier, this city is centered on hyper efficiency and speed. So, you have signs advertising food in pill form, instant beauty makeovers, energy drinks, transportation, holospecs and other productivity-oriented technologies.

This was super fun because I was trying to create loud and eccentric visuals. I was able to incorporate various design and illustration styles, a lot of them focused on typography. Although they were all different, it was important to make sure they contributed to the overall narrative. So there is a company that runs most of these businesses, Velcorp, and they aren’t without controversy.

Now to supplement the grease pencil signage, I did create this one using geometry nodes. This is an array of cubes meant to look like a large pixelated screen. It’s able to change between displaying patterns and text with the help of geometry proximity.

Environment

Moving on from the signage, I used grease pencil to add particle and volumetric effects like light and fog. Since you can draw anywhere in 3D space and use textured brushes, this was pretty to do. It was just a matter of placing my 3D Cursor in a specific area and drawing. It is possible to run into some visibility issues if grease pencil strokes or origin points from different objects are too close together. So, I just needed to be mindful of spacing.

I also used Blending Modes on the grease pencil layers, specifically Add to integrate them into the scene better. And the great thing about these Blending Modes is that they don’t only affect strokes, but meshes as well, which helped with the overall look. And for some of the light effects, I did animate the layer opacity with an F-Curve noise modifier to fade in and out.

Misc. Elements

To add more kinetic energy to the scene, I created these flying shipping pods and vehicles. So, the pods were a way for me to break up the visuals of the city signage. I just added these extruded curves with an alpha material on them to resemble a light trail. Then, I modeled these geometric pods and had them follow the same path as if they were flying.

The vehicles were modeled and supplemented with grease pencil details. A lot of them are from the Waste Department Authority, and they’re actually supposed to be hovering, but you can’t see that from the Camera Angle. I actually just wanted the tops of the vehicles to show. They weren’t supposed to be a focus - only to give the illusion there was some life in the city.

After this, I did add a framing device to have this figure looking towards the city from a darkened walkway, which was the original concept. This figure actually plays a key role in this story, and I’ll expand upon that a little later.

Now to finish this off, I did add a few compositing effects like glare and adjusted the sharpness and color. I checked Bloom because there were lots of light effects here and that was it for this piece.

Closing

Thank you so much for watching I really appreciate it! Again, thanks again to everyone that helped me reach this milestone. It’s been a wild ride, but it also feels like I just started my channel recently.

I also wanted to celebrate crossing 1500 students on my Magic Storybook course which is focused on learning 2D/3D art in Blender with Grease Pencil. This was a huge effort for me for the past 2 years and so grateful I was able to work with CG Boost on it. So if you want to learn more about the kind of art I create and the grease pencil tool you can check it out at CGBOOST.Com. In it, I’ll walk through everything you need to know to get started with it. And we’ll end up exploring techniques to create vibrant 2.5D scenes that move from beyond the flat page into dimensional space. Don’t worry if you’re not a drawing pro or are new to 3D - this course is totally beginner friendly. There’s over 10 hours of content, downloadable project files, and access to help anytime you need it.

I also started a few new creative projects. I have Little Maxwell but also Theo, my new easy care desk plant. If you want to support, you can follow them on instagram at @littlemaxwellthedog and @heycalatheo. I’ll put links to them below.

If you guys have any questions, feel free to leave them below. Thanks again and see you all next time.