Cairo 2121

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Cairo 2121: Vol.01

A Cyberpunk series

Set in dystopian 2121 Downtown Cairo, the city is almost completely on lock down, drone flocks to guard and monitor the streets 24/7, a large portion of humanity has moved to other planets.

Look Dev

The set for the video was inspired by Cyberpunk culture, some references included Blade Runner, Alita: Battle Angel, Ready Player One and the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 video game

Look Dev Process

The Drone Animations

Before working on the set, I had to create the drone which will be animated in the final video. It was modeled in Blender and textured in Substance Painter.

The Idle animation is very simple, I used a procedural method to quickly generate it using some noise modifiers to affect the position, rotation and scale of each individual part.

Original concept by Mark Master

Drone Idle Animation

The Cinema

Cinema Metro is one of Downtown Cairo's most iconic theaters. The cinema's billboard movies are a spin-off of actual Egyptian movies re-imagined in the year 2121

The Metro Station

During the development of the set, I created an imaginary subway (metro) station and decided to call it Shoubra Zone -as a homage to my hometown-. The metro station has the same look as real life metro stations set around Cairo.

The model for the station is available for download under the licence Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial more info about licensing here.

Shoubra Zone Metro Station

Compositing and Post Effects

During look development stage, I wanted to have a rainy/foggy mood to the whole set, but, volumetrics take a very long time to render and rain simulations would have taken a lot of time and processing power to create natively, so to solve this I decided to use mist passes to emulate the foggy look, and use After Effects to build up dynamic rain effects that interact with the road, and also add some atmospheric elements near the alleys and AC units.