Premise: Reflecting Upon Ideas Of Cyberpunk World

 I completed some initial drawing of what the cyberpunk city could look like. I tried to consider the overpopulation factor throughout the drawing.

I really like the middle building which points to the sky in a beam of light. I also tried to include the narrative that the city is alive by making the building on the bottom right out of a helix shape, much like a strand of DNA. 

I was then going to continue along with this idea by drawing more building and layering them in a way  which looks like the image below. This was translate the sheer volume of buildings in the city. 

Although I like this idea as every building is unique with its own personality, I feel it would be far too much work for the type of project I am doing. As my project focus is the fight scene, to spent so much time on objects which will only appear in the distance seems like a bad way to spend my time. 

I could however solve this issue by making the city in the background a matte painting, however I still want to have the city add to the animation in scenes such as the time lapse at the beginning. This means I will still need to model the city which brings back the original problem. 

Finally, along this city is able to look like anything, I still want it to carry principles of Japan in its design so that you could tell that Japan was the original idea. An example of an influence that did this was renaissance, having a city build on top of its original carrying important elements of the original across to the new world e.g. the Eiffel tower. 

I decided to refer back to my thumbnails which detailed the original concept of the city as well as the influences.  

II really like the over cramped  look of the image below and how you can see the need for taller and taller buildings as the population has become overwhelming. I could take this concept and simply build upon the idea by adding a few unique looks to the buildings, much like how I completed the Japanese palace. 

I also like the alternate Japanese architecture as it keeps it familiar with the traditional side however show the obvious advancement of the technology this city has over the original. 

This is the look I attempted to create with my drawing however I feel I added far too much variation in the architecture. I feel the middle image is the style I should focus on the most, using basic shapes to build up the city. 

I also need to consider that this is the type of person living within this city and so what changes would need to be made in order to provide a comfortable living?