Singaporean Landscapes: Cut-and-paste greenery

With the opening of After The Fall at National Museum of Singapore in a few days time, I thought I should post up a series of entries about the design process of the holograms that I've been working on.

When I began thinking of my desired aesthetics for an imagined "Singaporean landscape", I can't think of anything more apt than clean textures and hard cut lines in the 3D models; that impression of some master designer's wildly clicking Ctrl-V all over the landscape. Bizarrely hard contrasts between forms - such as this example of the generic industrial property constructed within a hair's width of the highly decorative chinese temple:


View from the Bedok Park Connector: Taoist Federation Building meets Industrial Carpark on Bedok North Ave 4
(Photo: Debbie Ding)
Or another example is this pristine specimen of a concrete and metal crash barrier that I encountered the other day whilst out walking around Bedok - so blindingly white and perfectly new that it may as well have been a 3D render:







ITS REAL


For efficiency, the top tip would be to cut away any faces/vertices that do not ever appear within the camera view so no processing power will be wasted on that information that you will never get to see within the final render. So for a very tall tree, you can simply cut off the tree's crown as long as you won't see it and you won't need the shadow of the leaves to impact on the overall scene.



If you did it right, you'll be able to dramatically reduce overall file size and render time. But the visual outcome is in the file you'll also see a lot of hard cuts in the virtual greenery... And whilst I was working in the isolation of my flat in London a few months ago when this project first began I was actually worried that I might have overdid things with my.. er... overzealous cutting-and-pasting. But I need not have worried! For upon returning to Singapore, I was gratified to see countless examples of this highly efficient cut-and-paste greenery at work:



Recently the trees around Bedok Reservoir seem to have been subjected to a round of very fastidious tree pruning which look like a model picture of the cut-and-paste public greenery that was in my head. A cutting exercise facilitated no doubt by what they describe as more cutting-edge tree monitoring tech...