Cyberpunk Diorama - Spring Cleaning Hobby Challenge. Completed

Yesterday I managed to create a little mock-up of the project in its eternity.

I ran into some traps, the biggest being awkward proportions of the scene. As you can see bellow I tried to force some perspective by breaking up the side walls, but that costs additional work – I’ll need to create “stand-in book backs”. As you can see in the picture, I’ve already scanned two most suitable (theme-wise as well as size-wise) book covers from my library. Hope that shall not stand out to much in final product, but I’m not ready to destroy books for the project.

I also opted to print a picture to cover back of the scene (maybe I’ll blur it a bit in some pic processing program, or change colour palette a bit). I did it as there shall be no time for me to create all the designs and most importantly calculate scale for them to force the perspective even more. I’m still thinking to build it in a way allowing future interventions/upgrades anyway, so maybe someday that will change.

So… up to the scene; the story I’m trying to depict here is quite simple and very standard. Hanako, the slightly augmented yojimbo of one of the megacorps carries out a mission of utmost importance. On behalf of the CEO Tanaka, she needs to dive into slums of the city to retrieve (dead or alive) a former employee of the corporation’s CHEM-DEV division. He went rouge, and sells untested synthetic drugs to any abuser ready to pay for it. The drug unfortunately is produced on secret formula the traitor worked on, in said megacorp. Situation turned truly disastrous when competition of Hanako’s employers learned about that opportunity. They hired Oko, the ninja master with the mission of bringing rouge chemist to them. Right here and now, we see a frozen moment of time when Hanako learns about her enemy and gets ready to fight for her life and mission in this dirty alley.

The mock-up is created only to learn the masurements and get idea of the composition. Final product will get ton (hopefully, if time allows, etc.) more thematic details – pipes, cables, heap of garbage, piles of newspapers, net terminal, holo-adds (ATARI and Camparicfor for sure), windows and obligatory ladder between balconies.

One last word about  lighting, I don’t want to flood the scene with one LED at the top, I want it to be rather dark. Right now I’m leaning towards fibre optics and a couple of point lights, like a lamp over the door at the right, maybe headlamps of the hoover car in the back or some obscure net-terminal at the corner. This, however, is a lot of work that I don’t think I have time for, and I need to order the fibres from oversees unless I find them locally (which I haven’t until now). I think I’ll leave the spaces for the fibres, should I have chance of installing them in the future.

I’m also opened to suggestions on details and props that will best show cyperpunkiness (is that even a word?) of the scene, please leave a comment if you have any thoughts on that.