Wood, Repetition, and Strange Terrain

Lately I’ve been pulled toward wood.

Not in a literal “let’s build a cabin” way - but in the way wood holds memory. Grain lines, subtle imperfections, that quiet warmth you don’t get from metal or concrete. I wanted to see what would happen if an entire world was built from that feeling.

This was less about designing a specific story and more about following a material instinct.

Inside Cinema 4D, I started experimenting with Octane Scatter, pushing repetition further than I normally would. Thousands of vertical extrusions, clustered and distributed across a landscape until the ground stopped feeling like ground. It began to look like growth. Like erosion. Like something halfway between mineral formation and tall grass.

There’s something meditative about working with scatter systems. You set rules, introduce variation, then step back and watch it form patterns you didn’t consciously design. It feels closer to gardening than modelling.

The tower forms came afterwards, almost as a response to the terrain. I didn’t want hard edges or sharp industrial language. I wanted structures that felt carved, coaxed, or grown out of the same wooden logic as the landscape. Continuous surfaces. Soft tapering. Entrances that feel hollowed rather than constructed.

The drones were introduced as contrast, smoother, cooler, slightly alien against the warmth of the environment. They’re not fully defined yet in narrative terms. At this stage they’re more about tension in the image than story clarity.