Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/04/28/photo-safari-on-the-hunt-for-futuristic-looking-backgrounds-for-my-3d-models-of-robots-and-spaceships/

I just got back from Gasometer, a district of Vienna, where there is a treasure trove of empty, futuristic looking buildings.

Thanks to the international financial crisis these buildings are almost completely deserted, which makes getting empty shots to go behind my 3D role-playing game art all too easy, and adds to the feeling of a highly automated future world. A world which is much less densely populated than present day Earth; and this is the scenario for Tarazet, my science fiction role-playing game setting using the Traveller system.

On the shoot there was also a great juxtaposition between the high tech office and business park structures and a row of Victorian looking gasometers, the ones the district is named after.
The modern structures are forced to go around these old listed buildings in ever more convoluted contortions of bridges and angled walls.
I think I got some great shots, and one building had so many external louvers it made my digital camera strobe. It’s a real building, but it looks like a special effect from a science fiction movie, perfect.
The light was just right as well, the so-called “magic hour” (I learned it was called this by watching the extras on Madagascar 2) at dusk or dawn when the light is almost coming sideways and the sky looks a beautiful bleached-out blue. There were even a few puffball cloud floating about, gotten lost from the mountains of creamy white cloud on the horizon. I took quite a few shots pointing the camera upwards at imaginary spaceships (I’ll put the spaceships in later with Photoshop) and tried to “accidently” include the top corners of the futuristic buildings, as though the illustrations were reportage shots.
Yes, I’m very happy with the shoot and I think I should have some great backdrops to use in my 3D science fiction role-playing game illustrations, but of course I haven’t downloaded them yet and checked them out on a decent sized monitor. Fingers crossed.