I looked at the German architecture that Attack on Titan was based off and made a mood board of all the images.
I then made a collage of buildings and scenes from Attack on Titan that resembled each other.
Having these real world examples help give me a better idea of layout and structure, I will try to incorporate this into my design work.
To choose a starting point I sieved through my screen shots focusing mainly on the structure images and chose the most visually interesting that were not too complex.
Out of these four I decided to go with the one on the bottom left. I chose this because the terrain has elevations and several houses that are of similar design but laid out different enough that they look more unique. I then gathered images of the area and similar buildings and created a mood board.
With the starting point chosen and a mood board created I am now going to move onto a quick block out to get an idea of how to make each building.
I decided the best way to approach this was to gather as many images of the locations as I could then decide a specific screen or setting to build the rest of the project around. I started by going through every page of the manga and saving any page that had good images of buildings or smaller relevant details. I then took any pages that only had a few panels that were relevant and cropped them so I would only be left with the useful imagery. Here is an example:
Full Page:
Crop:
I them went through every episode of the anime and took a screen shot of every scene that had buildings, details or textures in focus that I could use. It is important to look at both as the manga and the anime are far apart in detail, below is an image of the exact same location from both the manga and the anime.
The layout and detail in the anime are much higher than the manga making it the more useful reference source however the manga does have some details the anime does not (an example I found was a small weather vain) making them both useful.
Taking this forward I am going to look at the architecture the show was based off and sort all the images into specifics e.g. housing, street layout, textures and assets. This will make the 260 images I gathered much easier to navigate. I will also decide on a location/scene for the main focal point in this project.
