The day is almost at an end, but Hellfarch has found the city where his cursed prey resides. With a crooked grin, he paces toward his destination, his new friend hanging for dear life from the tip of his lazily-swinging tail.


Continuation from this. The rat model was made by  Cantstopgrowing, who has made it available for download for Maya users here.

Guess who finally got a decent-looking city model into Maya! I wasted a LOT of time trying to model one by hand (with very poor results), but eventually I caved and tried City Engine, which can generate great-looking city geometry very easily. After getting the (admittedly pretty friggen annoying to set up) free trial and exporting the geometry into Maya (which was very easy and actually possible to do in the trial version, which was nice of them), my next stumbling block was that I had to convert all of the textures from the default Phong material to one that Renderman actually likes. Trying to render any non-Renderman material in Renderman makes the model show up grey, and the city has probably well over a hundred different materials, so converting them all by hand would have been a weeks-long nightmare. Fortunately, there are a lot of nice people at the Renderman forums, and one of them gave me a script to automate the task. I now know a little MEL from studying it, and it's proven to be incredibly handy for making minor tweaks and such.

But the exciting part is is that I finally have an environment more interesting and complex than a floor-o-default-material to make more Weird Fetish Stuff with Hellfarch in! And I thought I'd celebrate that by showing the city from afar and making a more atmospheric piece.

And wouldn't you know, this just happens to be my 100th submission on this site! Quite fitting, I feel.