Behind the Scenes: 🚧 Cyberpunk 2077 Illustration

Sometimes I miss my beginnings, when I mostly produced low poly designs. At that time, it allowed me to be faster and iterate more on my ideas. As time went on, I felt comfortable doing more detailed stuff quickly, but stylistically, I will always be a sucker for flat shaded designs. 

Because it's not only a question of "what can you do", but over time becomes more of a "what should you do" question. If you can produce realistic designs, does it mean you always need to do it?

I would say it really depends on the project and if I want to stay flexible, I occasionally need to go back and explore simple styles. Because as you employ different workflows, your creative thinking changes too. And it might become an issue, when suddenly you need to do something stylized and you find yourself stumbling.

Visit the full Pinboard here

But you don't need to really go back. There is always a way to push things forward, even if based on past skills. I had this note in my list for a while, to create an unbounded city scene. Something I'm not doing often, because as I said, simplifying allows me to iterate and move fast. So I mostly stuck to a diorama format. That produces some challenges on its own, but now I felt like getting rid of those boundaries and expanding beyond the camera edge.

As for the last factor, that kind of glued everything together, I had the Cyberpunk's Quadra vehicle on my list since the game released, but never got around to it. And as I often connected my environment low poly dioramas with iconic vehicle, I decided to go similar route again.

So as you can see, having long-term ideas on the list, trying to practice neglected skill and additionally push myself to do something new, these three pieces led me to create a Cyberpunk 2077 inspired city.

At first I though I will go the classic night + neon style, but as I explored some CP screenshots, it occurred to me, the game was really vibrant and colorful. Because you spend a lot of time playing during daytime, the game has its distinct flavor. If the authors counted only on nightly neon-colored scenes, the day part of the cycle would just be bleak and grey.

So the scenes offer a plenty of vibrant palettes and I thought it would work beautifully with really saturated flat shaded look.

As always, I tackled some of the composition challenges in the sketching phase first. Not only it allows me to test out some layout ideas, but for a scene like this, it saves me a huge amount of time. If I would just jump into Blender and started dishing out buildings, I wouldn't know which parts would be visible and what details would become important.

Having the sketch allows me to focus on the details I'm 100% sure I want to include, while I can still have the flexibility to change things on the fly if there's a sudden idea spark.

You can watch the process video on Youtube.