elise ngo

I chose to visualize the city of Octavia from the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino because it was the city that caught my eye. I thought it was unique that the entire city hangs from a web between two mountains, and felt that it would be fun to represent in a 3D model. My general conceptual and aesthetic goals in visualizing Octavia was to create an ominous, somber scene to represent the unnerving feelings of having your fate lie in the hands of the webs holding up the city.

My intention behind this was to recreate the city of Octavia that Calvino described in his book Invisible Cities, but through my own interpretation. He states that “the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long”, so I wanted my visualization of Octavia to be darker and eerier to represent the citizens impending doom.

I was largely inspired by description from the original text, especially where he says, “There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void…”, but I got inspiration from other artists’ visualizations of Octavia as well. Another one of my aesthetic inspirations was dark, ominous environments.

Some of the challenges I experienced were creating the web/net and the strings that the buildings are hanging from. I was able to create the spiderweb by using a transparency map, but I still struggled to create individual lines for the ropes holding the buildings. I also had challenges with creating the texture for the mountains because I wanted the mountains to look more realistic, but I managed to mess with pyramids and textures to make the mountains look like mountains.

I could improve my work by adding ropes to all the buildings because they’re all just floating since I couldn’t figure out how to make individual ropes within the time constraint. I also think the addition of clouds or fog would help enhance the ominous aura because that was my original intention, but I didn’t have enough time to add it.