Using V-Ray Next to create a manga-inspired world

The concept

I got the idea for Atom County — which is what I’m calling this world and series — from a personal piece I did a while ago, titled “Mikey, Berta caught on fire again. Can you check it out?” To me, it captured a one-of-those-days kind of moment that we all have.

It’s the pipe bursting on one side when you just fixed the other, or your software crashing when you forgot to save … for the last few few hours. It’s those little less glamorous — and usually quite funny for other people — on-the-job moments and frustrations that we can all relate to that I wanted to capture and make a series out of.

So that was the basic idea for my project. Next up, I needed to decide on a setting and world that my stories would take place in and a style to render my images in. I recently saw some of the beautiful background paintings from Tekkon Kinkreet and I just absolutely fell in love with the manga style, so I decided I wanted to go for a procedurally generated, more hand-painted, illustration look. 

It’s not at all what I normally do, which made it a completely new challenge for me — which got me very excited. I always try to learn something new whenever I do personal work; I also picked up Blender for modeling on this project.

I figured this kind of look would go really well with a mid-century modern, atomic-age world. And I’m a huge fan of that era. I think it’s an incredibly fun time period for design — and, so, Atom County was born!

My C.A.T. is in a tree

This first image in the series is called “My C.A.T. is in a tree,” with, of course, the C.A.T. being a drone — and not a cute, furry animal. C.A.T. stands for Copter Air Traxx, which is what you’ll see on the poster later in this article. I thought this would be a cute, retro-future pun and a good start to the series.