Going through my collection I stumbled across this.

An except from a storyboard for a self-initiated project that never came to fruition. When a boy meets and befriends a dragon, magic happens!

I’ve long been a fan of Dan Simmons’ seminal science fiction series – The Hyperion Cantos, which spans four books, hundreds of worlds, and almost 300 years, interweaving a diverse range of influences from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the poetry of John Keats, the works of Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Jack Vance, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson among others including radical theological thinkers.

In my spare time I’ve been trying my hand at a series of style frame concepts for an imagined intro to a series based on the first book of these works. One location to depict in the intro is the the seat of government for the Hegemony or WorldWeb, and a Ecumenopolis (a planet covered by a single city). The WorldWeb emerges from the scattering of humanity to hundreds of planets from the dying Old Earth, and is a collection of over 200 planets connected by ‘farcaster portals’ and ‘fatline’ provided by the mysterious AI TechnoCore, facilitating instantaneous travel and communication between worlds. Tau Ceti Center is linked to a number of other worlds by the River Tethys, which is connected via giant farcaster portals.

Work undertaken so far in Blender. Background cityscape is created using renderings of the diffuse and alpha layers of the city from an orthagonal view. These are then mapped on to planes.

Many of the later buildings are courtesy of CGTrader, and are in the process of being modified by me. Ground plane is courtesy of Google Earth. Smaller buildings are simple meshes distributed on the ground plane as particles using weight painting. Still some work in Blender in preparation for a polish pass in Fusion and Davinci Resolve, and in Photoshop.