Motivation

This project came from a desire to explore the combination of the night sky I used in my Moonlit Mountains project with the glowing lights and architectural forms used in Afterglow. I was of course aware of the great Dencity project by Hevey and chose to emphasize varied side perspectives rather than the aerial view that he employed.

Early Views

Here are a number of WIP views during development together with some comments on the additions.

Composition

A major step in development was when I realized I could explicitly design several different styles of composition - different ways of framing the moon/sun with the buildings. This greatly improved the quality and variety of the outputs. Here is a simple animation showing the six different composition styles.

Technology

I used plain vanilla Javascript with the Canvas 2D api. Buildings were generated with 3D coordinates and projected onto the 2D plane using different perspective views. I wrote code to determine the order in which to draw the various faces of the buildings. There is no complex raymarching or determination of shadows. I reused code from previous projects for generating the trees.

Release

The project will be available for public minting on Feb 21st, 2023. Thank you for your interest!