This is a WIP from a city I'm 'building' on Mars, for illustrating a story
I'm writing.

Parts of this whole world were submitted to the animation IRTC.  I added a
lot more detail to the dome which is only seen in the background, and added
a bit more detail to the city to build this image.

The city is a heavily modified Chris Colefax city.  My mods:
1) the buildings fit 'under' an Overhead object, which allowed me to change
the dome slope and size and not have to manually tuck all the buildings in
2) it takes two text files, allowing me to control the max height and
'foundation' of the buildings.   I used the latter to build the 'notch' in
the view, which is a transportation hub.
3) I modifed the reflectivity of the building windows, and added 'grass' on
top of the buildings.
4) No street traffic.  Instead, the vehicles.obj from Chris's excellent
macro's were modified to include trees.  The trees go through the same hight
check as the buildings, so on the edge of the city they either fit under the
doom or not at all.
5) the streets were modified to draw between vacant buildings (see under the
'park' in the center) but not between a vacant lot - this allows the 'notch'
in the center of the view.

Other detail and notes:

The notch has some green tubes.  These are thick glass pressure tubes that
trains move in.  (the trains were modeled but not added to this scene as
they are too small to see well, and I'm pushing 1.5G of RAM).  The idea is
that a maglev / train comes into the tube with one end open; then the tube
end near the outside of the dome closes, and air is added to the tube.  Now
the people in the train can come into the city.  Trains can be long, so the
entire tube system would run through the city in effect.

There are 'rails' outside the city from the tubes, but there's a bug in
myterrain following code.  I build a spline from control points and do a
trace() to establish 'piers' above the ground, but I need to move along the
spline instead of sampling just at the dozen or so control points.

The terrain got a little washed out.  it's "real" terrain taken from MOLA
data with a color overlay from Viking (also seen in the 'you are here'
signs).  I then ran this through World Machine, rescalled, and ran it
through again with an erosion filtering process.  It worked pretty well to
add close level detail.  I was going to go for an Isosurface terrain, but
couldn't get it to work well with progressivly height fields.

The people are poser models, with morphs added.  The dress on the woman is a 
dynamic cloth, modeled in Poser.  It was more (!) low cut than in the image, 
but I added some poly's in Wings to make it a little better.

What I basically did was take a 1.6 Km area, extract the center part, and 
'erode' that to add detail where the MOLA data was missing.

This is the same general area that I had in the recent IRTC anim round, but 
I had to move the city as I found even from high buildings the view just 
wasn't there - so I moved the city a little closer to a valley.  I mean, if 
you're going to go to Mars to live, and hide under a dome, you might as well 
have a view ...

Things to do:

1) The terrain is a little washed out.  Radiosity settings I think aren't 
right.  It's a slope dependant blend between rocks and sand, sort of.
2) The streets aren't really displaying right - there are some trees on top 
of the tube trains, so it looks like I need to move the tubes in.
3) The guy was supposed to be muscular but looks a little chunky.
4) I get some odd comments on the dress - it was supposed to look like a 
light weight summer dress.  Thouhts?
5) The 'you are here' sign is all messed up, that needs to be fixed
6) I'm in the process of adding more detail to the buildings and changing 
the buildings so it's not so obvious there are only 3 different ones.
7) the grass on top of the buildings are supposed to be gardens, so I need 
to add some detail there.
8) The trams wash out a bit in the distance, need to fiddle with that.
9) Framing - there is an elevator door, but you can't see it at this angle. 
If I show more of the 'vator, then it blocks the view.  I think that's about 
as good as I can pose it.
10) I was going to make the 'mesh' on the railing smaller, it's a layered 
texture.
11) I have a small area light that attempted to fill some of the really dark 
shadows.  However, the whole scene looks a little more red than I thought. 
This could be the area light (was attempting to duplicate the sky color).  I 
think I need help on radiosity settings.
12) this scene was shot with photons, due to the glass on the buildngs, but 
it's not clear to me that they really worked.  Streelt level should be 
pretty bright from the reflections on the windows (sun is close to noon).

Comments, suggestions?

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