I picked the “Thin Cities” Octavia from the book. I chose this city because its story altered the definition and image in my mind of what a city should be like. I like how Octavia has its inspirations from the spider webs. My general conceptual and aesthetic goals in visualizing it were to create something similar to the style of my sketches and try my best to visualize the spider-web structure. It is not going to be fully based on the story.

My work is based on the random sketches I did for the ideation assignment. The island bases were added because the space looked empty and suddenly Animal Crossing came into my mind. I thought that the clouds would look good with islands. There were two main categories of challenges, one was caused by my unfamiliarity with Rhino, and the other was the difficulty of turning images in my mind into something in Rhino. My very beginning intention was to build a spider web structure through curve and pipe functions. However, after an hour’s struggle, I found out that it is not the best way to visualize the structure. Therefore, I drew the spider webs and then tried to map the image onto a plane. It took me a long time to adjust it to the right scale (including revising the image). Similar things happened when I tried to apply the functions such as “Boolean split,” “loft” and “sweep.” During the process, the rendered products were usually not something I expected, therefore, I had to try different colors and textures on the same object to see if the rendered version look okay. I learned a lot from this project. I got more familiar with Rhino, and I am happy that I could turn a city in my mind into a 3D model.

I think I could improve on the texture such as adding textures to the river between mountains and the sea surface. Other than that, I think I could improve the web structure and add more buildings to the structure. I could also add more details to the lawn.

Images I drew for mapping

Images (textures) I used from the Rhino Library and some process screenshots