It's a start.... (now follows a somewhat lengthy post)
Luckily you have an unusually good reference image. The easiest (although not necessarily the fastest) method would be to first make a schematic showing where all the support tubes and bits of junk go, scan it into your computer, and use it as a background to model on. In your case, drawing the schematic should be pretty easy because everything is pretty geometric, and the reference image has pretty good contrast so nearly all the bits and pieces are visible. Texturing will probably be pretty intimidating, but I think that you could probably get away with 5 or 6 basic textures that are basically squares with a color and some random grime, and a couple more detailed textures for the larger pieces. Just be systematic.
What program are you using? The method of making electrical arcs is different for each program. In Maya 4.5 or 5, you could probably get away with a Paint FX electrical arc (basically a generated lightning and you choose the start and the finish). In Lightwave, you make a bunch of narrow lightning shapes (rotating and flipping them to get more usage out of each lightning model - if you do it right, no one will notice the difference), apply a bright, glowing surface to all of them. In other programs, I wouldn't really know, but the technique would be similar.
I nearly forgot about making cityscapes. I've never done them myself, but I do remember reading a good (quick) technique a while back. I really can't think of an "easy" method, but this is by far the simplest. You start by making a bunch of generic buildings and putting them in a common file that you can copy them from. You make a block looking something like a puzzle piece, so all the blocks in a set will interlock, no matter if they've been rotated 0, 90, 180, or 270 degress. You could simply use a square, but if you're not careful, it'll be easy to tell what you've been done. If you use an interlocking shape, it'll be more difficult. And you just tile these blocks over a large area to look like lots of buildings. You occasionally make more unique buildings and put them into the blocks to add some differentiation. The more buildings you make, the more blocks you make, the more difficult it is for other people to tell what you've done. Of course, that means that you have to do more modeling, so it's basically now up to you to decide how much work you want to do.
Oh yea! Camera tricks! If you put your camera very high above the buildings, you'll obviously need to do a lot of work to put in a lot of buildings, although the buildings don't necessarily have to be very detailed. If you put your camera low, within the buildings, you'll have to put a lot more work into detailing the buildings, although you won't need nearly as many buildings because obviously the buildings in front will block out the buildings in back until you won't be able to see any more buildings even if you add them. Again, this is up to you. This makes things more difficult, but if you put your buildings on a hill, or something (making blocks won't necessarily work in this case, so you'd just have to individually place buildings), it will look less like CG. This is really important for coastal cities. If you're modeling New York, or any other giant metropolis, you can get away with a flat ground (many developed cities have evened out the ground enough for it to be difficult to see - San Francisco being a notable exception), but if you're modeling only a small city or town, unless it's in the middle of a desert or flat meadow, you'll need to add some variation in the altitudes of the buildings or else it'll look fake.
Good luck!
Matrix
This post has been edited by what_is_the_matrix : 28 September 2004 - 12:26 PM
