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My Tron Build, Part 1 Lore, Textures, and Basic Shapes

 

Decorative image with text Request Access as key phrases from the TRON movie.

As promised, I'm starting blog posts about my Hubs/Blender builds. This will be a bit like stepping into a running stream as I'm over 2 years into my learning journey.  I'm not that far in, still working primarily in modeling and I've done a little animation and I'm currently learning Grease Pencil (2D).  Plus, I hope that some of my writing will help others.


What I do in Hubs and with Blender, for now, is pure art. 

And that's a good starting point for this blog because My Tron build, The Grid, was a really fun art study in negative space. In other words, this build had me work on what was not there just as much as what was there.

Tron


I don't remember how me and YouTube started cross-pollinating on Tron. Truly, I'm not that into the movie (you will not believe that by the time this post is done because now, my Tron lore cup runneth over). It might have been this video, Sweet Dreams are Made of These, Epic Tron Version. I just find this song mesmerizing.

 
 
At some point, probably when searching out YouTube Blender tutorials, I ran across this video, Make Tron City in Blender, Real Time Render.


 
I watched this, it's only 39 minutes and the creator is true to his word (mostly) that the build can be made in a short period of time. (There is little sped up footage.) That means a lot when evaluating a Blender tutorial. Many creators speed up time and give building 'the hand wave' approach.  However, a close watch will show that this creator, Daniel Grove, made the Tron city three times as there are two different showcased cities (the center building changes) and then the one he builds as his how-to in real time.

Nonetheless, it looked very simple. I was intrigued to play with bloom.  Making my own textures with Blender was something I had just learned to do. I started.

Textures


This video and I think perhaps one by Grant Abbitt on using Grease Pencil Drawing in Blender got me going with using the Drawing tools in Blender and practicing something relatively easy, straight lines. I input a few circles but most of the textures are straight lines with a few angles.

In my "lit review" of Tron art, angles are a cool element. They are not quite 45 degrees, but they play near there.


Collage of 6 images showing various angles in Tron fan art or movie captures. Aesthetic is black with glowing blue grids.
Inspiration images - note some of these are directly from the Tron movies/books but some are fan art.


So I had my first bunch of textures, these were all made in Blender.  Note that they are white on black.


Collage of 5 textures using straight lines and dashes used to form the textures of a Tron City.
None of these show up in the final build

I got the rest of the buildings made (and conceived of my "Halloween twist"), put the textures on and ramped up the bloom.  The tutorial has you build a Color Ramp to turn the white to blue. In Blender, it looked fabulous!  Essentially, I'm done! No, I'm not. I make immersive art.

I put the build up into Hubs to get inside it for the first time.  

Nothing. Blackness.  But that's because my build was unlit-- as in completely unlit; no light source.  I had to play with some HDRIs to get the lighting I wanted.

And, I had bloom off on my own browser. That's the problem that you can partially see below. It's not glowing.

Work in progress. Note that the blue color is working but nothing is glowing.

So starts the work of translating what is a great scene in Blender to work in the WebXR platform, Hubs. There are LOT more settings to be worked on. In total, lighting took me ~3 days, slowing tweaking each setting and using the Hubs Blender Add-On after every tweak to see if I was working towards the effect I wanted.  Plus I had to turn bloom on.  

Problem

But of course, Hubs cannot understand the color ramp taught in the tutorial. So now I had to rebuild my entire set of textures in blue on black. Plus by now I know I want a set of purple on black for Halloween. I didn't quite keep a set of Blender files for each texture, so I had to remake most of them from scratch.  Bummer. That was another two days work.  Plus I had to check for just the right "blue" (HEX 0DC2FF) and "purple" (HEX 7809A4) inside of Hubs. I would reference those 2 HEX codes frequently.  In hindsight, the blue worked great. But the purple-- even though I tried 3 different purples (a dark, a mid, and a light) was still too dark; it didn't glow much in general. I'd pick a lighter purple if I did this again.

Image of comparison of blue and purple straight line textures.
Notice how the purple just seems darker.

At this point I have one of the textures in blue (the road) but I'm still tweaking the bloom. Notice the white in most of the textures. The street lights are glowing from a blue material with emission, not a texture.

Capture of work in progress from Blender. A cityscape is visible but some elements are white on black while others are blue on black. The blue parts are glowing.
Only the blue is emissive at this point. I haven't replaced all of the textures yet.

In addition to re-texturing, I was adding Flynn's Hideout (aka apartment or safehouse) and heavily researching Tron lore to determine the purposes for things. I learned a LOT more about Tron that I ever wanted but it was cool to explore a world that was a computer simulation. 

Collage of images from Tron, Flynn's Hideout. Elements of a glowing floor and ceiling, fireplace, meditation pool, some "bits" (rubic's cube like decorative elements) on the mantel.

For example, there is a fireplace with a mantel in the hideout. I had to ask "what is fire in the Tron world?" and found that it appears to be blue transparent cubes (Tron Wiki, Flynn's Safehouse, Trivia). Blue transparent cubes coming up! First, actually made in 3D in Blender. Then I picked a camera viewpoint and rendered one in 2D to be used with Hubs spawner. The result? Close enough. I'm still hesitant with transparency in Blender and Gimp. If I were to make these again, I would not have as many lines.

Image of a black cube with a glowing blue outline.
My Tron firecube

 

Design Elements for Flynn's Hideout

  • Was spawn location
  • Can see Tron city (The Grid) from an outer deck
  • Water/meditation pool
  • Angled black shiny walls (entire Tron world is black angled shiny rock)
  • Book shelf in the back. Books appear to be significant in Tron lore; As "text", it might be the only part of the real world that computer programs can attempt to understand. The poorly done 'do you know Jules Verne' joke implies that programs struggle with fiction/nonfiction.
  • No real food, but Flynn does eat. Note: humans are users. Users are self-powered in the Tron world. They are the only entity that is self-powered.  That self-empowerment grants them somewhat of a god status.  It also allows Flynn to live separate, off the grid, and beyond the reach of Clu.
  • Bedroom to the side. 
  • The fireplace has objects that seem to bemuse simultaneously confuse Clu.  I recreated this scene in my video.

Image from Tron: Legacy and my video, showing the moment Clu reaches out to the objects on the mantel.


Side-by-side comparison of TRON: Legacy and my video (See Part 3)


Capture of Blender 4.0 showing only 3 cube shapes made an entire city.
Work in progress: Shows that the basic city is 3 cubes.

 

 

 

Capture from Blender of the basic shapes of Tron City.
Final Tron City build, Blender. From here you can see ONLY the shapes.

Capture from Blender of the Material Preview mode of Tron City. The blue colors appear flat.
Same Final Tron City build, Blender, Material Preview.

Tron City as it appears inside of a Hubs instance. The blue colors are glowing and the black is a really deep black.
Tron city, The Grid, in Hubs with bloom on.

This series of images shows what I mean by "the textures carry the weight" and the use of negative space is compelling.  The textures add what could be windows, doors, or programming through the scene. On the "roads" the textures give a sense of movement.  It's wild that all that busy city is from a few cubes, with the Mirror Modifier and some linear textures.

Tron City Elements

  • Apparently, it's always dark and stormy in the Grid. Technically, it can rain and the Grid is rather proud that it can simulate rain. I did not make rain. I added some blue-tinted clouds that float across the scene via my animation. The black rock everywhere is shiny.  Perhaps it is a break in the rain.

 

Capture of Tron City in Hubs. A blue tinted cloud floats above roads with glowing lines.
It's always stormy in the Grid

  • I became much more comfortable with the Mirror Modifier in Blender in this build because the tutorial has you create the city with one mirror (i.e. X axis) but I simply added the other horizontal mirror (i.e. Y axis) for things like the roads and you quickly get a much larger symmetrical city!
  • The city is NOT fully symmetrical. I created some extra buildings that I manually placed into the scene. 
    Capture of two simple buildings in Tron. I called them Ram as they were meant to replicate old RAM motherboard modules.
    "Ram" buildings- like the computer part.

  • I created some fun "socket set" Emerald Plaza buildings, like in San Deigo. 

By Nehrams2020, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6637555 

Capture of hexagonal shaped buildings like the Emerald Plaza in San Diego. These are black with blue glowing outlines.
My Socket Set buildings in blue

 
Capture of purple-outlined hexagonal towers with a glowing Hubs sign in Tron font at the top.
My Socket Set buildings in purple with the neon Hubs sign

  • I chose not to make the Games stadium.  It's already a big build and I didn't need another building complex for my story line. 
  • I thought about having the Solar Sailer arrive at some sort of tethered location at an antennae. I built the building for it to arrive at (per the Tron plot). But I decided that I liked the look of it just sailing through and past better. 

About that center power beam


The tutorial doesn't care how high the beam goes up as you just get it going up out of the animation render camera shot. But since my city is immersive, I had to think about how high of a beam I wanted. The beam IS part of Tron lore and it represents communicating back with reality so I thought it should go up forever! I really thought I had a perfect application for Fading Assets Gracefully with Vertex Alpha. But with Blender 4.0 (or some version near there), alpha has changed and changed how it is done. Thus, I'm lost and could NOT get it to work. I'm sure the problem is with me and I just need to adjust to the new system, but still I'm floundering.

Still, a mantra that I keep repeating did work: There is more than one way to do things in Blender.

So I tried Hubs black fog instead. Plus, since I already knew by that time that that beam was about 500m from the spawn point, if I set the fog to 500m it should just about perfectly hide the beam until a visitor goes out to the cliff edge.


Capture of a far off blue glowing city in a black night. The city is barely in view.
View of Tron city after just stepping outside of the Hideout



Capture of a blue glowing city that is closer now, with a center power peam just coming into view.
 View of Tron City further out on the cliff edge

 


Tron City from Flynn's Hideout. Design elements included are Flynn's bedroom, his meditation cushion, a pool of water, and the city in the far distance.
WIP image: Note the elements: the cushion, the water pool, the bedroom, and the far off city.

Some settings:
The final build of Tron City with Flynn's Hideout: ~18MB. I'm very sure most of that were my textures. But all things considered, that's a tiny number for a build 1 kilometer in size.

40,000 triangles


Environment Map: Quarry Cloudy HDRI from Poly Haven, 1k

Capture of a reflected cloudy sky inside on a glass table. This is one of the impossible in real life things that VR can provide.
Seeing cloud reflections indoors? VR fail, but I'm sure that will get fixed someday.
 

World Surface Rogland Clear Night HDRI from Poly Have, 1K 

Tone Mapping: Blender Filmic

  • Exposure 1.0
  • Bloom on
  • Threshold 1.0
  • Intensity 0.30
  • Radius 0.50
  • Smoothing 0.03

Hubs Fog

  • Linear
  • Black
  • Near 100
  • Far 500 

 

In Part 2 I'll show my Tron Light Cycle, the Solar Sailer, and Tron Avatar.

In Part 3, I'll describe the Live Event.


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