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The Undead Reckoning -team is looking for your ideas and comments. Join and show your support for Undead Reckoning. Photoshop Modern Ruins and Post-Apocalyptic Scenes/Cityscapes
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DescriptionSo, I will personally be working on a LOT of these types of environments myself over the course of 2012, and that will be one of my main focuses for awhile. The idea is you take a modern city, structure, or place - and you deconstruct it to look like a ruin, or destroyed. It gives a pretty surreal, eye-catching effect. Its an aquired skill - and maybe some of you haven't seen it used before but would be good at it and want to try. Or maybe its down your alley already. Or maybe not. Anyway - none of these images are mine, and cannot be used, but i dug them up to show you what i'm talking about. Some things to keep in mind: 1. the more photorealistic, the better. these will be used with real elements (bipeds, explosions, smoke, fire, ect) 2. You can make them either FRESHLY in chaos with minor, eye-catching changes, or in an advanced state of decay. Our character is going to be visiting various ruined places ranging from RIGHT after the fall of society, till over five years after the earth stopped. So there is a lot of wiggle room for how devistated your scene could be. 3. The bigger the better. There are all kinds of sites where you can get high-res city scenes to work with. The more high res it is, the more able I am to use virtual cameras to move around within the scene and pan and zoom and make it seem epic. If its small, our camera is just STUCK there, and it risks looking more like a photoshopped pictue than we'd like people to know. 4. We can't infringe on copyright. So your main stock photo needs to be royalty free. You can get alot of these from wikimedia commons, sxe.com, and eve flckr. Use common sense! 5. You don't have to get TOO complicated with it. I can use the basic geometry of the picture and vanishing point to make a pretty convincing 3D environment in after effects. 6. We don't need live/moving elements (birds, characters, moving water), a moody sky/clouds (or any at all!), or an ambient light, lighting style, or color correction. These things can and will be added all in post. The film will have a specific color theme, which I can add. The sky will need to be at least slightly kinitic and moving, which is part of my design scheme. So basically, we just need to come up with ruined buildings and locations, in as neutral light as is plausible, with either a plain or transparent (png style file) sky ... with nothing frozen in time within the fram that gives away that its just a still. Then we can add characters and movement elements to REALLY sell the look of it. Anyway, I don't honestly EXPECT any submissions, and thats fine. I just put this task up in case this happened to be down anybody's alley and they wanted to contribute an original work to the project. Maybe get it out of the style that i'll get into the groove of, and bring some unpredictability to thepallete. If anyone is interested, I can email tons and tons of rubble and destruction and decay stock photos for fodder for your clone-stamp. -D.L. p.s. if your file is too big, or you just prefer to email it to me instead of post it up here publicly, hit me up in a message and i'll give you an email to send it too. AND... if you WANT to try this, but never have, here are a few links to some basic tutorials on how to make stuff like this. http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/photoshop/chaos/index.html http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/photoshop/urban/index.html
Shots Destroyed City ProgressHello, Douglas, I've been a little busy lately, however I've attached further progress on the shot I've sent before. I haven't had much time to do a couple more, but any feedback on this progress would be great. Regards,
 psd filesheres the psd copies of the two images i did-had to reduce the dpi to 72 to make the file sizes small enough to upload so make sure you increase them back up to 300dpi when you re-open them in photoshop-giz a shout if there are any technical issues CommentsThank you! Destroyed City_WorkInProgressHello, Douglas, I have attached a work of mine regarding your descriptions and tutorial examples. Please advise of any additional notes, thoughts, or adjustments you believe is needed. Additional Note:
Thank you!
Commentsoverlay is more like setting the layer to a low opacity-multiply does something similar to what you're talking about.It's generally a good idea to desaturate the image you are overlaying otherwise it may interfere with your colour scheme Yeah - isn't overlay mainly just adding the darkest elements of the texture to the image, then replacing all of the lighter elements with your original image? and, honestly, layed PSD files give me a little more leeway in terms of little elements here and there that I can add or adjust to fit whatever shot the matte ends up in. And for the record - i'm liking the "matte" nature that both of you are making them in. gonna work pretty well for flashing up in the background i think. google a large picture of granite-tiles and slabs are good-enlarge it till it covers your whole image and set the blending mode to overlay it will add a more weather beaten and worn effect to your image,especially the buildings-worked a treat for me!Have fun and night-night-its bedtime my part of the world... I think you've hit upon something in the "false structure" department. By that, i mean where the building is "chipped" away showing bits of the rebar, I-beams, ect. Also - feel free to toss up a layed PSD file if you saved it. You can get a shot with a real sense of motion if you have that sky move 5-10 pixels one way or the other BEHIND the skyline and mix that with a bit of fog element in the mid/fore ground going in the same direction. Thanks, Johnny! I feel like it's missing something... I'm gonna make the cars more destroyed and rusted, but there's something else I can't put my finger on... any advice? like that sky!its got a stormclouds gathering feel to it-look forward to seeing the finished piece. more ruinstried a different angle this time-as before i have included source photo-will work on more when i get the chance-stay tuned 
CommentsThat looks perfect as a concept. I'm uploading a version of mine soon. Hope it helps, Douglas.
love it.  Input/ClarificationJohnny Mcgonnell, who dropped a killer still photo within a couple days of me starting this task, asked me if there were specific places that I'd like him to wreck. I replied by going into this really over-long response that I thought I would share, and look for input on. Always open for suggestions. Well, in my mind there are essentially three types of shots that will use the modern ruins kind of backdrop. So you can tell me if that kind of organizational method makes sense. 1. Generic, geographically-neutral environments: This would be things/places that could be plugged in essentially anywhere and just give the vibe of decay in general. Such as a gas station, strip mall, airport, street corners, alleys, ect. Places that could be anywhere, but just look destroyed. Leaving a tad of room for the dead, wrecked cars, trash, or whatever to be composited in and give it movement in the frame and whatnot. This also includes making some places that are purposely shot from an extreme angle (aerial view from overhead down to an empty street, for example) or purposely framed to allow for insertion of a lot of shambling corpses. Smaller, localized areas with a specific hard surface that things will be moving across or placed stationary on to give a real ability to composite. Walkers, smoke from windows, fires, wrecked stuff - just simple environments. 2. Landmark's to Make it Real: Places that the story isn't specifically or necessarily taking place, but that can be show in a montage or cutaway (maybe to a mixture of "news reports" over the radio or something or just some moody music) showing that the problem is nation/world wide and not JUST where I manage to put the real camera. Examples would be St. Louis with its arch, or London with Big Ben - I don't intend to write any of the script in these places, but a few seconds on frame of these two places would instantly stretch the sense of scale about 5,000 miles. This approach is just an idea to expand scope - not concrete. Input? 3. Story-specific Locations: This one is on me to flesh out more. This would be kind of specific buildings/places in specific cities that I intend to write major scenes in. Should only be a handful of them, and I will just need to have a bit more random (or specific, eventually) environments that can stand in. Right now- as far as I have written- this only includes San Diego, California at the moment. This will be kind of a pain in some respects because the water will just need to be left out of all pictures because I’ll have to composite real water in. Also, lots of sailboat traffic in most still photos of the place makes just that much extra work to eliminate it.
Anyway. That’s just the way I imagine organizing them. You can tell me if you think of something that streamlines those ideas or makes more sense all together. CommentsThis shot doesn't have comments. Websitehttp://cargocollective.com/ashleysamour I have attached my website.
There is no city scape, however I am capable of creating one for you. Please send me more info about the shot you need if interested. Thank you,
CommentsYou're pretty killer with the flora I noticed. I'm liking the foreground tree branches and tone of the darker stuff for sure. I don't really have specific shots written out in detail yet. I'm fleshing out the writing from a very basic outline (if you check the blog on here, you kind of get a handle on the pace of this project and the restrictions placed on it by my job) so as of right now - i'm more in the stage of getting a jump-start of gathering people and "shots" to work with, over a long-term kind of process. So down the road, i'm sure i'll have a few more specific things that i'm tryin to achieve in detail, but right now it's kind of in a "storing nuts for winter" stage if that makes sense. apocalyptic ruinsthis is my first image -have uploaded the original source image(google searched)as well so you can see how much its changed.will post more as and when i get them done-feedback is always welcome-hope you like it 
CommentsThats pretty killer man - Never did I expect such awesome results so quickly. And thanks for the original too - that will help with a reference for making a vanishing point track and for keying and whatnot. By all means - send me anything you do while you're just kicking around bored. I love it. |
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