11. HOW TO STYLIZE?

When researching images to develop a style, besides photographs, I also came across many illustrations. I really liked the stylized aspect of some illustrations of cityscapes that I found, I wanted to try to implement such a style for "The Music of Erich Zann."

One rule that I wanted to follow is that there should be no straight lines in this world. To be sure, this is a nice rule to follow, and was exploited to great effect by modern architects from Gaudi to Gerry (and several others, besides). When comparing Antonin Gaudi to Frank Gerry, one key difference is the presence of sharp corners: they are absent in Gaudi, but frequent in Gerry. In other illustrations that I found, I felt that the curved lines with sharp corners lent themselves better to horror, as opposed to more organic curvature which seemed to lend itself better to a playful, childish mood.

I had decided that I would initially model and texture the buildings with straight lines, as their photographic references dictated, and then I would merely apply some lattice tool to skew the architecture into more interesting shapes. This imposes a few demands on the model's geometry. For one thing, it needs to be a very high resolution in order to not break or bend in a non-organic manner: I want curved surfaces, not jagged surfaces.

However, none of this came to pass. I am not sure why I didn't, but the primary answer to such questions is typically that I was too impatient to make such stylized alterations. But here, there is much more to this explanation. For one thing, I modeled such buildings with several, non-connected parts. For example, the roof was not contiguous with the walls of the building; instead, it was merely a slab that I rested on top of the walls. So, when I smoothed and skewed the model, the different parts would never match up perfectly. I realized that in order to make such a stylized building, there were two things that I should have done: 1) just model the stylized shape from the beginning. But I couldn't do this because my own illustration and drafting skills are poor (that's why I copied reference images when modeling); or 2) The model's geometry would all have to be contiguous (which I didn't want to do because it would require that all the work I already had completed would be for nothing, and I would have to restart from zero). So, I just stayed with straight-line style architecture.

   
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